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- [00:00]
Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs.
- [00:02]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease.
- [00:09]
Tim Ferriss
Out how they do what they do.
- [00:10]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
My guest today terrified me so much when I first saw him in person, Pablo Holman, that I effectively avoided him for 15 years. Although we've crossed paths and now we are friendly. But I saw him stealing a few dozen credit card numbers from people on the front row of an event using hacking technology. And I thought, you know what? But maybe I should just keep my distance. Pablo Solman is a hacker and inventor and the best selling author of Deep Creating Technology that Matters, the Indispensable guide to deep Tech. And we'll talk all about what that means. Previously Pablo's worked on spaceships at Blue Origin.
- [00:48]
Tim Ferriss
You know that thing By Jeff Bezos.
- [00:50]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
May have heard of him 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 mosquitoes, 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's also managing partner at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world's biggest problems. We talk about his upbringing in Alaska of all places. Commonalities between skateboarding innovators and hackers in the more common computer science sense of the term. We get into all sorts of nooks and crannies and we have a few mutual friends in common. So I was able ask a lot of questions that were, I suppose, a bit from behind the scenes, which I really enjoyed. So you can find all things Pablo's eapfuture tech. You can find him on Xablos. At this altitude, I can run flat.
- [01:51]
Tim Ferriss
Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
- [01:54]
Pablo Holman
Can I answer your personal question now? It is inappropriate time.
- [02:00]
Tim Ferriss
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
- [02:06]
Pablo Holman
Ferris show foreign.
- [02:13]
Tim Ferriss
Pablo. I don't even know where to start, but I will start perhaps with my first glimpse of Pablo, which was circa 2008. I think it was the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It could have been Google Ignite, 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 block 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 Pablo 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 Tech Conference being held this week in San Diego. Using the speakerphone, 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 Ignite, because Brady also did Google Ignite at one point. Don't chuckle too much. The hack works for all many AT and T users, including anyone with an iPhone. Holman continued to show how Schlage Is that how you say that Schlage? Schlage locks, the kind that you likely have in your front door of your house, can quickly be 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 itunes store would soon be selling Tim O'Reilly's home movies for 199 apiece. 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. X doubt 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.
- [04:30]
Pablo Holman
It was wild times.
- [04:33]
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. I put shorthand here, password stealing robot keychain unlocking within a square mile question mark hardware in a car in Seattle, downloading and re uploading hard drives from unsecure WI Fi, printing food, things that taste like steak Question mark Oh man. So so far that's all. Is that all fact? Ish.
- [05:08]
Elon Lee
There's something factual about all of them. But certainly something must be exaggerated.
- [05:12]
Tim Ferriss
Certainly something must be exaggerated. Well, we will find out. Let's begin with question around this term.
- [05:18]
Pablo Holman
Hacker.
- [05:19]
Tim Ferriss
All right, what is a hacker to you? And do you consider yourself a hacker?
- [05:24]
Pablo Holman
Well, I'm a hacker because my early life was all around reverse engineering a computer. And that was sort of 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 9 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 kind of 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, a couple decades of my career 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.
- [06:15]
Elon Lee
Software development was invented long after I got started. So there's a lot I didn't get.
- [06:20]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [06:40]
Elon Lee
Of the computer security department and get them into, you know, helping go attack bigger problems.
- [06:45]
Tim Ferriss
How did you end up acquiring a computer in Alaska?
- [06:49]
Pablo Holman
So my dad had put some of the first, you know, mainframes in the oil industry in the early 70s, let's say. So he kind of. 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, you know, 9, 10, 11 years old at 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. You know, like it was just too early. And I was lit up about this thing. You know, Apple II isn't very powerful. And in those days, computers weren't useful. You know, 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 gonna 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 like inviting girls over to my basement to show em my computer and.
- [07:52]
Tim Ferriss
Is that what they called it back then?
- [07:54]
Elon Lee
It made an impression, just not the one that, you know, maybe I was going for. So I'm still doing that. You know, I'm still trying to convince people that these technologies are important.
- [08:04]
Tim Ferriss
So I'm trying to pull from your book, which I've been devouring deep 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 for my arm surgery. Try to pull from memory.
- [08:21]
Elon Lee
Way to go.
- [08:21]
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?
- [08:31]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. So the way I described that before in the book is just a simple way of thinking about the mindset of a hacker. You know, 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?
- [08:58]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [08:59]
Pablo Holman
And they're starting from a completely different position. They're going to take out the screws, break it into a lot of pieces. You've met Sammy. He's the poster child for this. You know, he's violating the warranty before.
- [09:10]
Tim Ferriss
He got the shrink wrap off just for entertainment value. People can listen to my conversation with Sammy Cam Carter about his amazing adventures and his crime and punishment involving MySpace computers.
- [09:23]
Pablo Holman
For a while, he's the most delightful.
- [09:25]
Tim Ferriss
Hacker, super delightful human. What did he do with Google Maps?
- [09:29]
Pablo Holman
Oh, Google Maps is one of my favorite things he did.
- [09:31]
Elon Lee
Early on, Sammy was finally allowed to use computers again. And he figured, you know, Google colors.
- [09:38]
Pablo Holman
The roads based on. For traffic.
- [09:41]
Tim Ferriss
Sure.
- [09:41]
Pablo Holman
Based on where everybody's phone is just reporting to Google when you're stuck in traffic. And so Sammy 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.
- [09:58]
Elon Lee
Because they look like they're all log jams all around. They all look like traffic jams. And so Sammy could manipulate the traffic. I mean, Google's since fixed this, but I often like to show off Sammy on stage and so I've shown his exploits a bunch of times and that's one of them.
- [10:18]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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- [11:49]
Tim Ferriss
Try it out.
- [11:49]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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- [12:09]
Tim Ferriss
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- [12:11]
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- [12:17]
Tim Ferriss
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- [12:19]
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- [12:52]
Tim Ferriss
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- [12:53]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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- [12:58]
Tim Ferriss
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- [12:59]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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- [13:22]
Tim Ferriss
That would otherwise pull me away from.
- [13:24]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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- [14:13]
Tim Ferriss
What makes for a good hacker?
- [14:17]
Pablo Holman
You know, the hackers have, one way or another ended up being the people who start from that position I described. You know, they're the ones who don't take the conventional wisdom of what something is.
- [14:30]
Tim Ferriss
Masters of off label use.
- [14:32]
Pablo 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.
- [14:44]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [14:45]
Pablo Holman
Ever. So a hacker, you know, 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, you know. And I learned a little bit about hackers because I was like you sort of described, I was doing this bizarre.
- [15:06]
Elon Lee
Kind of hacker magic show, stealing people's passwords.
- [15:09]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [15:17]
Elon Lee
And I'm like, yeah, you could probably tell me what I should do.
- [15:21]
Pablo Holman
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 know, 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 Sammy, it's no problem at all. Like, 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 my. The reason I think I'm here, 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 can. Are doing can be taken places that are not computers. And you did that with all the things in your books. You know, that's what the tango thing is.
- [16:47]
Elon Lee
And the wrestling thing is, and all.
- [16:49]
Pablo Holman
Those examples, you know, 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.
- [17:04]
Tim Ferriss
Right outside of software.
- [17:06]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [17:07]
Tim Ferriss
Well, thank you for saying that. Yeah, 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?
- [17:24]
Pablo 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, including, like, he's the first one to, like, 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. 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, may be impossible. He can spend months every night trying to make it happen on a skateboard and then finally get it.
- [18:32]
Tim Ferriss
Did he grow up in Santa Monica?
- [18:34]
Pablo 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 kind of analogous to my Apple II and 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 0 to 1. 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 know, you need a skill to do it, Rodney. You need 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 inventories. It's not a legitimate career choice.
- [20:03]
Tim Ferriss
I only know one person, a guy named Stephen Key, who is just prolific in the toy world. But.
- [20:08]
Elon Lee
Okay, cool.
- [20:09]
Tim Ferriss
He's the only one. He's literally the only one.
- [20:11]
Pablo Holman
But how many music artists could you name?
- [20:14]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [20:15]
Pablo Holman
Or. Or painters or, like, actors? 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.
- [20:28]
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. And it might be pearls before swine, because I'm not technical. I do not know how to program. But I am curious. For instance, this robot. I don't remember its name.
- [20:47]
Pablo Holman
Oh, the hacker bot.
- [20:48]
Tim Ferriss
The hacker bot with a printer attached, right?
- [20:51]
Elon Lee
Oh, yeah.
- [20:52]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [20:52]
Pablo Holman
What had a screen? Not had a screen.
- [20:55]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, how did that work?
- [20:56]
Elon Lee
Okay, so what did it do?
- [20:58]
Tim Ferriss
Maybe you could describe it.
- [20:59]
Elon Lee
So it was, like, a long time ago.
- [21:01]
Pablo Holman
So Eric Johansson is kind of 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, like, a spectator sport. And we realized, like, oh, these kids are making robots.
- [21:18]
Elon Lee
If they can do it, we should.
- [21:19]
Pablo Holman
Be able to do it, because we're.
- [21:21]
Elon Lee
Super geniuses with a machine shop. I had the Blue Origin machine shop. So I figured we could. We could build a robot. So we started, you know, like, Eric is amazing.
- [21:29]
Pablo Holman
You know, you come up with an idea, he'll smoke cigarettes and stay up all night and get it done while I go to sleep.
- [21:35]
Elon Lee
And so Eric.
- [21:36]
Tim Ferriss
Great friend to have.
- [21:36]
Elon Lee
Yeah, great friend. So Eric starts trying to get PWM.
- [21:41]
Pablo Holman
Controllers and all this stuff to build a robot. I bought the wheels. You know, I'm really.
- [21:44]
Elon Lee
Because I'm good at buying wheels. You know, we started building this thing, kind of, you know, assembling it as it goes.
- [21:50]
Tim Ferriss
These are robots for a competition?
- [21:52]
Elon Lee
No, we just were making a robot for no good reason.
- [21:55]
Tim Ferriss
I got.
- [21:55]
Elon Lee
And eventually we figured out it should have a reason.
- [21:58]
Pablo Holman
So we're like, well, what should our robot do? Neither of us drink beer, so need to fetch beer. We're like, well, we could make it.
- [22:04]
Elon Lee
Do some hacking, since that's what we're normally doing. So it became the hacker bot and everything that robot can do a nerd.
- [22:12]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [22:21]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
Users at a conference.
- [22:23]
Pablo Holman
Anywhere. Anywhere. Yeah. Drive up to them and Then show them their passwords on the screen because.
- [22:29]
Elon Lee
You know, we had all the tools for cracking.
- [22:31]
Tim Ferriss
This is a WI FI password.
- [22:32]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, we're cracking WI fi at the time, one of our buddies had made a tool called Air Snort to crack WI fi and we were cracking WI fi and stealing passwords for fun.
- [22:41]
Elon Lee
But the cool thing about the hacker bot was it was just insanely mediagenic.
- [22:45]
Pablo Holman
Kind of thing where everybody thought it was cute. It's a nefarious robot stealing your passwords.
- [22:50]
Elon Lee
But people thought it was cute. So we realized we could.
- [22:53]
Pablo Holman
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 hacker bot kind of got.
- [23:03]
Elon Lee
On television and that kind of thing. And so we learned something from that.
- [23:07]
Pablo Holman
How to contextualize the lesson. I made a lot of friends stealing passwords too.
- [23:13]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, they're like, wow. Kind of got to keep your prospective enemies as close as possible. I came on honestly, I'm not going to lie. When I saw that demo at whichever conference it was, 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.
- [23:42]
Elon Lee
Fair enough. You're not the only one.
- [23:44]
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'm sure there are basic digital hygiene things that you can do.
- [24:06]
Pablo Holman
You've heard of.
- [24:06]
Tim Ferriss
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 like the entire machine behind it, they're like, they're going to get your stuff.
- [24:17]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, that's true. The problem is it is a moving target. So there's this kind of war of escalation between attackers and defenders. And a lot of what people are familiar with is just kids in Romania screwing around, trying to attack against every IP address of the Internet and see what falls in their lap. That's kind of, you know, stealing credit cards and bitcoin wallets and stuff so that you could kind of 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 you know, 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, right. 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.
- [25:40]
Tim Ferriss
What does the marketplace look like for zero day exploits? Right? 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?
- [26:03]
Pablo Holman
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?
- [26:13]
Tim Ferriss
Which means you don't have to click on it, right?
- [26:15]
Pablo Holman
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. So there are certain hackers whose job is to vet these things.
- [26:30]
Tim Ferriss
Those are the brokers?
- [26:31]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, the brokers.
- [26:32]
Tim Ferriss
Do you find those people on the.
- [26:33]
Pablo Holman
Dark web or is it like some of them? I think these days they'll hang out a shingle. I'm not going to name any here. No, no, but the point is you could. 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 they 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 you know, 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.
- [27:27]
Tim Ferriss
I do too.
- [27:28]
Elon Lee
Yeah, amazing.
- [27:29]
Tim Ferriss
It's just there a few months.
- [27:30]
Elon Lee
Amazing hacker.
- [27:31]
Tim Ferriss
Go to Brasov if you have the chance, folks. Also, little known fact, lots of bears in Romania. I find that to be an appealing draw. But there bears a lot 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. So does that exist for hacking? Is it like, oh, this particular city in China, oh, this particular place in Uzbekistan or wherever?
- [28:13]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, well, there's two things that cause that. So one is a center of gravity, of technical excellence. And so you could say, you know, 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. You know, we would go over there and just wonder why we were.
- [28:43]
Tim Ferriss
You say had past tense.
- [28:45]
Pablo Holman
I don't know now because again, I'm sort of hacking other things. But we used to go to the Chaos Computer Congress in Germany, which is like the big hacker convention.
- [28:52]
Elon Lee
And you know, we could blow their.
- [28:54]
Pablo Holman
Minds a little, but they could blow.
- [28:55]
Elon Lee
Our minds a lot.
- [28:56]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, and so that was cool. But what happened is in the early 2000s, 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.
- [29:28]
Tim Ferriss
Must have been fun grabbing dinner or drinks with that crew after work.
- [29:32]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, that's what we were doing. It was, it was actually, it was.
- [29:35]
Elon Lee
Funny because in the same era dodgeball.
- [29:38]
Pablo Holman
Came out, which is like this pre iPhone location talking about the movie with.
- [29:44]
Tim Ferriss
Ben Stiller, not the movie.
- [29:45]
Pablo Holman
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 like a hundred friends would get the text and then like, I'll.
- [30:00]
Elon Lee
Go to the bar. So we were like, the drinking rate.
- [30:02]
Pablo Holman
Amongst hackers just went off the charts. But we were hanging out together all the time and that was actually 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 a center of gravity is. Hackers have conventions that they go to now.
- [30:20]
Tim Ferriss
What are the most interesting to you?
- [30:22]
Pablo Holman
Defcon kind of 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.
- [30:30]
Elon Lee
But you could still go to Germany for ccc. That would probably be the best thing.
- [30:35]
Pablo Holman
To do in the us.
- [30:36]
Tim Ferriss
Leave my phone. Hotel room.
- [30:39]
Elon Lee
Yeah. Tour Con, if you. Oh, yeah, don't take any computers to these things. But, you know, go naked and you'll be fine.
- [30:44]
Tim Ferriss
Naked and afraid.
- [30:45]
Elon Lee
There you go.
- [30:47]
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 in what? Do you have any thoughts on that?
- [31:07]
Pablo Holman
Oh, my God. Geopolitics.
- [31:10]
Tim Ferriss
Promising start.
- [31:11]
Pablo Holman
You know, 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 know, you can kind of 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.
- [31:59]
Tim Ferriss
What are the main technologies? I mean, well, these semiconductors and AI.
- [32:03]
Pablo Holman
Are we talking about these days? Those are the biggest ones. And the reason they're so big is they're Generally applicable computers can be applied to everything. They'll end up. If you haven't got one in your pocket by now, you will. I mean, it's just they go everywhere. So computer is a very important technology that's generally applicable. So it has to. You just can't ignore it. So you could hang out in Copenhagen and draft off China and the U.S. if that's what you want to do. But I think it's dangerous not to play the game. So 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. 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.
- [32:54]
Elon Lee
Energy and we've been burning gas to get it.
- [32:58]
Pablo Holman
So maybe we should find something better. So now there's a lot of attention on improving energy. I'm so excited about that.
- [33:05]
Tim Ferriss
Do you think the hyperscalers will actually help resurrect nuclear energy in the us?
- [33:11]
Pablo Holman
I think hyperscalers are going to save us. It's a crazy thing to say. It's a crazy thing to say, but.
- [33:18]
Elon Lee
You can thank Meta and Microsoft and Google.
- [33:21]
Pablo Holman
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. Like, try to remember when Shell or Chevron advertised to get you to buy more gas. Like, 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.
- [33:54]
Tim Ferriss
Speaking of dodgeball, I think in your book you wrote that at one point, was it the Senate was like switching players on a dodgeball team between Chevron and someone else?
- [34:05]
Pablo 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. You know, last year the most bipartisan bill I know of was called advance, that was to build nuclear reactors in the U.S. 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 a anti nuclear activist group. 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.
- [35:21]
Elon Lee
So this reactor is unquestionable.
- [35:23]
Tim Ferriss
Size of a small car or something like that.
- [35:25]
Pablo 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.
- [35:43]
Tim Ferriss
And when you retire it or when it stops functioning, fill a hole with dirt. Just bury it.
- [35:47]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. Leave the uranium where we found it. Like, it's a really exciting way of making reactors. There's a water in the borehole that goes down and cools it. What's so fascinating is if you look at like 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, the water pressure in the borehole from gravity creates enough pressure to cool the reactor.
- [36:17]
Tim Ferriss
Gravity has been pretty reliable, pretty reliable so far.
- [36:19]
Pablo Holman
So then that makes steam that goes back up and you run a turbine like in a regenerator 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 of years, then build a commercial reactor in like 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. And then we'll make thousands in a gigafactory.
- [36:54]
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, but looking at China, they have how many, I.
- [37:05]
Pablo Holman
Think reactors, 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 takes Them about three years to build a reactor. And those are big ones. They're smoking it. It's amazing.
- [37:20]
Tim Ferriss
Is that. Well, maybe it's cleaned up, but mostly legacy technology in terms of.
- [37:25]
Pablo 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.
- [37:36]
Elon Lee
Think are the best.
- [37:37]
Pablo Holman
But the future of reactors involves a bunch of advanced reactor technologies. 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.
- [37:53]
Tim Ferriss
That's a regulatory hurdle.
- [37:55]
Pablo Holman
Just because the US has never figured out how to approve any advanced reactor technology.
- [38:00]
Elon Lee
Once they do, we could build something like that.
- [38:03]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [38:29]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement.
- [38:41]
Tim Ferriss
But why do I bring this all up?
- [38:42]
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- [39:12]
Tim Ferriss
So check them out.
- [39:13]
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- [39:41]
Tim Ferriss
So if you were 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.
- [39:59]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [40:01]
Tim Ferriss
Or at least not lose.
- [40:02]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [40:02]
Tim Ferriss
What are some of those pieces of advice that you would give?
- [40:05]
Pablo 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. 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 gotta 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.
- [41:03]
Tim Ferriss
I 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.
- [41:17]
Pablo Holman
I feel like that's your mantra.
- [41:19]
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 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.
- [41:39]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [41:39]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [41:53]
Pablo Holman
The great example to me was how like recycling played out in the U.S. you know, 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 plant. 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. You know, 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. So solve energy first.
- [43:02]
Elon Lee
You know, if you want to go.
- [43:03]
Pablo Holman
Do carbon captured, pick CO2 molecules.
- [43:07]
Tim Ferriss
Was it 400 parts per million?
- [43:09]
Elon Lee
400 parts per million means 400 needles in a haystack with a million pieces of straw. That's what we're talking about.
- [43:15]
Pablo Holman
So good luck. I think you want to find a.
- [43:19]
Elon Lee
Less entropic source of carbon, like, leave.
- [43:21]
Pablo Holman
The coal on the ground, if that's what you want to do.
- [43:23]
Elon Lee
It's very highly concentrated there.
- [43:25]
Pablo Holman
So if you had energy that was cheap and basically free. Yeah. 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 a logical order.
- [43:48]
Tim Ferriss
And tell me if I'm off base here, but I don't want people to misconstrue what you're saying.
- [43:53]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [43:54]
Tim Ferriss
It seems like what you're saying, if I'm understanding correctly, is much like people sometimes say, it's the economy stupid. Like, it's the energy stupid. Like in the sense that that is the biggest lever we have to pull. Yeah, it is. What you're not saying is everyone should stop recycling if their municipality actually sorts and so on.
- [44:14]
Pablo Holman
I mean, maybe they should stop. Some of them are working.
- [44:16]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [44:17]
Pablo Holman
I hope in Hagen.
- [44:18]
Tim Ferriss
And one day 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.
- [44:27]
Pablo Holman
Well, so again, something like. Like plastics are part of the reason we all exist. Like, they are very, very useful for saving lives in a lot of ways. But, yeah, you want to use the plastic where it belongs.
- [44:39]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [44:40]
Pablo Holman
Not where it doesn't belong.
- [44:41]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [44:42]
Elon Lee
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.
- [44:50]
Tim Ferriss
The inventions that you describe in your book are really compelling. And as I believe you describe them, please fact check me if I'm getting this off. But that with deep tech, and you should probably define what that means, 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 upfront. 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. You have built or indirectly funded people who have built much better mousetraps.
- [45:42]
Pablo Holman
Right.
- [45:43]
Tim Ferriss
Like quite a lot. And been involved with Nathan Mervold's lab and building technology for, say, reducing the likelihood or severity of hurricanes. Simple tech which we could get into.
- [45:54]
Pablo Holman
Right.
- [45:54]
Tim Ferriss
It's like, why the hell isn't it being used?
- [45:56]
Pablo 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, like, Hewlett Packard, there's somebody there who's an engineer that's super smart figuring out how to make inkjet printers, like 1% 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. You know, it's 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times more efficient. 10 times on any metric could be a good window. So that's kind of where I see deep tech breakthroughs as becoming sort of contenders. Then we try to invest in them and help get them out of the lab or out of the garage and into a startup. So 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 knocking 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 sass 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. That to me that's where the action is. I think I can prove that.
- [48:05]
Tim Ferriss
Does it need to involve hardware?
- [48:07]
Pablo Holman
It doesn't need to. We have a small percentage of things we back 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, you know, things like that. So things that move the needle on what's possible. New chip architectures. I do. But anyway, the point is let's get back to hardware in a minute.
- [48:35]
Tim Ferriss
Yep.
- [48:36]
Pablo Holman
When you're investing, you're looking at risk as you describe. 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.
- [48:58]
Tim Ferriss
On a napkin, except in my biotech.
- [49:01]
Pablo Holman
Investment, 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 to 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, markets, trillion dollar markets. And that's very important to understand. 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 $100 trillion a year. So Silicon Valley is doing 2% of what humans rely on. That other 98 is my TAM is.
- [50:41]
Tim Ferriss
Top line revenue and GDPfare comparison.
- [50:44]
Pablo Holman
It's, I mean, you could nitpick over the details. It's actually, if, if it's unfair in my advantage. Okay, 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%. If you fact check me, I'm gonna win. Okay, 98% of what's left is, that's energy, but it's shipping. Shipping is a 2 trillion dollar industry as big as software.
- [51:12]
Elon Lee
We could talk about that.
- [51:14]
Pablo Holman
Durable goods.
- [51:14]
Tim Ferriss
And by shipping you mean mostly ocean based, right?
- [51:19]
Pablo Holman
Durable goods, all your sinks and bicycles and light fixtures and chairs. That's $4 trillion a year. Automotive is another 4, 5, 6 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.
- [51:44]
Tim Ferriss
What about the regulatory implementation piece? Because for instance, I was reading the book and I'm fascinated by containers. Oh, okay. How the standardizing of containers.
- [51:54]
Pablo Holman
Oh, cool.
- [51:55]
Tim Ferriss
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 sea borne container ships. Cargo ships, which is a necessity to reduce drag because they're optimizing for fuel. Right. And the alternative that you propose seems like a no brainer. Right? But then I'm like, well, wait a second, is it like the Greek and Chinese cartels, so to speak? Like the sort of.
- [52:31]
Elon Lee
So you've named two more kinds of risk?
- [52:33]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. So yeah, I mean, what are we talking about?
- [52:35]
Elon Lee
All right, well, so that, so just.
- [52:37]
Pablo Holman
To make it clear for the audience, we have a team that's developing cargo ships that are autonomous. So 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.
- [52:54]
Elon Lee
One documented pedestrian ever.
- [52:56]
Tim Ferriss
Are we talking about jc? Is that it?
- [52:58]
Elon Lee
Yeah. And, and so, you know, other than that, it's probably gonna work, you know.
- [53:03]
Pablo Holman
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 $2 trillion spent in the shipping industry every year are spent. Five out of six of those dollars is burned.
- [53:20]
Tim Ferriss
You said sailing. What if there's no wind?
- [53:22]
Pablo Holman
If there's no wind, we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone. 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 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.
- [53:47]
Tim Ferriss
Why aren't these things everywhere?
- [53:49]
Pablo Holman
Exactly. So they're not everywhere because 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.
- [54:00]
Tim Ferriss
Instead, they ended up suing Uber everywhere they launched.
- [54:03]
Pablo 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.
- [54:16]
Elon Lee
Come help us build this ship. You know, help us take on. You don't need to be a physicist.
- [54:22]
Pablo Holman
I got physicists.
- [54:23]
Elon Lee
What I need is entrepreneurs who want.
- [54:25]
Pablo Holman
To build these industries. And when you look at what happened with Uber, that playbook is incredible. What happens the day my first ship sales? 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? So that's where.
- [54:48]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, Maersk just might. No, take it into hospice.
- [54:51]
Pablo Holman
Risk of assassination is high, I grant that.
- [54:53]
Elon Lee
Maybe higher than even in taxis, because there are, you know, a few big cabals globally that run the shipping industry.
- [54:59]
Pablo Holman
You might need to partner with one of them. But that's a tomorrow problem. The truth is, we can do this, Pablo.
- [55:05]
Tim Ferriss
One day, I'm going to ask you for a favor.
- [55:08]
Elon Lee
Yeah, I might need one myself. So after this error. So the point is, you could identify, you know, I don't know, risk of assassination as a fourth kind of risk.
- [55:17]
Pablo Holman
But look, we have to build these things, the regulatory risk in different industries. You know, in shipping, you're dealing with Teamsters in ports. I mean, that's where labor unions come from. You know, read about the wobblies having shootouts with the sheriff's office. I mean, this is crazy stuff in the history of labor. So, you know, you 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%. So you're incentivized to build a biggest ship you can. Well, those ships are clogging up ports. So if we 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 load or unload. So that 14 days is a little slower when you're sailing. 30% slower, but overall it's faster. But we can make smaller ships and lots of them.
- [56:33]
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 would need to start replacing a lot of the container ships that are clogging.
- [56:45]
Pablo Holman
I mean, that would be great, but, you know, we'll 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. We could just do that.
- [56:56]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [56:57]
Pablo Holman
Sell your Happy Meal toys to islands.
- [56:59]
Tim Ferriss
Is Pablo's a common name in Alaska?
- [57:02]
Pablo Holman
Pablo's is a totally fake name because all hackers have fake names.
- [57:08]
Tim Ferriss
Is the last name fake, too?
- [57:09]
Pablo Holman
My. 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. So I've been called Pablo's for longer than anyone can remember.
- [57:23]
Tim Ferriss
And I have to ask. I know we're taking a left turn here, but on the COVID of your book, you have your glasses, and every video I've ever seen, I see you in the glasses. What is the story behind the glasses?
- [57:34]
Pablo Holman
So I've been wearing the same glasses for, like, 20 years, which is kind of why they ended up on the COVID 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 I'm in labs all the time, I kind of need safety glasses that wrap around.
- [57:52]
Tim Ferriss
Are they prescription?
- [57:52]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [57:53]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [57:53]
Pablo Holman
I've been wearing glasses since I was 4, but I started wearing these. They're made of titanium alloy.
- [57:59]
Tim Ferriss
What are they? Are they Oakley?
- [58:01]
Pablo Holman
Oakley made them in their heyday. So back before Oakley got sold out, they had these designers who were like, you know, Little gods that could do whatever they wanted. And they built this factory in, like, Nevada to make titanium frames. But this is intensive to do 425,000 watts to make one pair of frame. And they have all these volatile gases in the casting process.
- [58:25]
Elon Lee
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.
- [58:33]
Pablo 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, you know, two pairs would have lasted this long. Yeah, I have more. Just in case I live a couple extra lifetimes, I've been stockpiling them.
- [58:48]
Tim Ferriss
Are you optimistic? Would you describe yourself as optimistic?
- [58:52]
Pablo 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. Like, 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. So I call it possibleist. So I think a future that's awesome is absolutely possible. A shady future is also possible. But the balance is up to us. And so that's how I would describe that.
- [59:45]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [60:08]
Pablo Holman
Right.
- [60:08]
Tim Ferriss
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?
- [60:22]
Pablo Holman
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 what you get, 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.
- [60:48]
Elon Lee
Things that were like way too soon or way too cool or way too expensive.
- [60:52]
Pablo Holman
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. You know, I don't find that I'm effective if I'm working on something that's not interesting. So I've always optimized for that. So 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 don't think I'm just a shiny object. They can hire whoever they want.
- [61:19]
Tim Ferriss
Not my words, by the way. It's one of our mutual friends words. Yeah, shiny meaning attractive by the way, not just like crow collecting buttons or something. I'm just saying.
- [61:29]
Pablo 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. Your startup fails, you end up on your mom's couch, Regroup, try again. For most people, you and I know most people in 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?
- [62:06]
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 Merville, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, all Seattle.
- [62:18]
Pablo Holman
Right.
- [62:18]
Tim Ferriss
So is there some engineered serendipity placing yourself in the right location or is that less of a factor?
- [62:25]
Pablo 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 dot com bubble. And so it was a wasteland. I mean it was this.
- [62:49]
Tim Ferriss
What does that mean?
- [62:50]
Pablo Holman
It was.
- [62:51]
Elon Lee
I like it.
- [62:52]
Tim Ferriss
So I need to understand what it.
- [62:53]
Pablo Holman
Means because the poster child for.com bubble was pets.com and they had this ad campaign, they spent like a billion dollars.
- [63:01]
Elon Lee
On ads like super bowl ads with a sock puppet.
- [63:04]
Pablo Holman
And it was just the most ridiculous thing.
- [63:06]
Tim Ferriss
It's you're like the end is nigh.
- [63:09]
Pablo Holman
The end was nigh. And it's because, you know, everything was overhyped. Too much money was put into too many dumb things. Yeah, I have a bad attitude about this because we had real technologies, you know, 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 over indexed on entrepreneur and we threw the inventors under the bus. It's time to course correct. You know, I want to find, I want the guy from WeWork and I want to give him a nuclear reactor. Like, 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 now that we work.
- [63:54]
Tim Ferriss
Founder is a controversial.
- [63:56]
Pablo Holman
Okay, whatever choice.
- [63:57]
Elon Lee
No, no, I'll take the Uber.
- [63:58]
Pablo Holman
Founder.
- [63:59]
Elon Lee
Any good? Any founder.
- [64:00]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, controversial.
- [64:00]
Tim Ferriss
Otherwise, the two strong ones.
- [64:02]
Elon Lee
Okay, Fin, but good entrepreneurs, no tech.
- [64:06]
Pablo Holman
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 like a whole neighborhood. And I was like, oh, try that.
- [64:34]
Tim Ferriss
How did you choose Seattle over every other place?
- [64:36]
Pablo Holman
Because I'm from Alaska. Seattle's like the default next stop. So I knew more people in Seattle than anywhere. And so I was just hanging out in Seattle during the summer with fun, employed and looking at real estate prices.
- [64:49]
Elon Lee
Thinking, oh, this could be okay.
- [64:50]
Pablo Holman
And then I got an email from Neal Stephenson.
- [64:53]
Tim Ferriss
I was going to bring him up.
- [64:54]
Elon Lee
So I'm glad you did.
- [64:55]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [64:55]
Pablo Holman
So Neil, if you're any kind of nerd, Neil is a demigod.
- [65:00]
Tim Ferriss
So Snow Crash, Profit Metaverse. Yeah, I mean, when did Cryptonomicon come out? Which I love?
- [65:06]
Pablo Holman
98.
- [65:06]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [65:07]
Elon Lee
So early on cryptocurrency in 98, when Cryptonomicon came out.
- [65:14]
Pablo Holman
So I'm a closet Neal Stephenson fan. And so I got an email from Neil and he's like, hey, how did he find you? Mutual friends.
- [65:22]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [65:22]
Pablo Holman
Jeremy Borenstein introduced us and he was the founder of the company I'd been working for doing AI stuff that got.
- [65:28]
Elon Lee
Shut down in dot com bubble.
- [65:31]
Pablo Holman
Sock puppet attack. So Jeremy introduced me, Neil. Neil said, hey, we're building a lab to do some cool stuff. You know, come check it out. So I went down to this lab. So Neil and an astrophysicist named Keith Rosema had gotten this old envelope factory and turned it into, like, a machine shop. They, like, bought a machine shop on surplus, and actually the crusty old machinist.
- [65:56]
Elon Lee
Kind of came with it.
- [65:57]
Pablo Holman
So they were trying to build what was called Blue Operations. And it was. 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 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. 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.
- [66:29]
Tim Ferriss
Wow. What were the alternatives that you guys were exploring?
- [66:33]
Pablo Holman
So rockets are, like, 90% fuel. So when you light up a rocket, you're just burning fuel to get out of Earth's gravity well.
- [66:42]
Tim Ferriss
Cargo ship plus.
- [66:43]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, right. Totally. So can't make rockets sail, but we thought maybe you could. So what if you could just take the. The payload, the craft, the part you want, you know, people are 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. Like, we have the technologies that could do that now, so I think eventually we will do these things. But the problem was, you know, 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.
- [67:20]
Elon Lee
And our job was to figure out what we could do with, like, one.
- [67:23]
Tim Ferriss
That's a ballsy bet.
- [67:24]
Pablo Holman
So, yeah, so he's done pretty well since.
- [67:27]
Elon Lee
He's done all right. And now it's like putting a billion.
- [67:29]
Pablo Holman
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 had a bunch of ideas that were really cool. And this, again, started in 2001. I'm gonna go to Blue Origin next week for the 25th anniversary. 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.
- [68:14]
Tim Ferriss
Sounds safe.
- [68:15]
Elon Lee
It's totally not safe. This is before you could buy a quadcopter at, you know, Walmart. So we had to write all the.
- [68:22]
Pablo Holman
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've fire the thing up and it goes up and flies around like a ufo and then it comes and back down and does vertical landing. So we proved that it could be done. 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.
- [68:55]
Tim Ferriss
This is going to be out of left field, but I like out of left field. But you know what, I don't want to leave this question of why you get hired for these projects too quickly.
- [69:06]
Pablo Holman
Sure.
- [69:07]
Tim Ferriss
I, for whatever reason, 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?
- [69:16]
Pablo Holman
Honestly, I think there's probably somebody better at everything than me.
- [69:20]
Tim Ferriss
You're very multidisciplinary.
- [69:22]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. At this point I'd say, you know, I'm kind of the canonical T shaped person. You know, 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 vibe coding for fun, but like, 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. You know, we see that with scientists or engineers a lot, that's they're specialized too much. And if you look at like millennials, they're kind of typically very flat. They just, you know, I could do anything, but they can't do anything.
- [70:10]
Tim Ferriss
Well, an M dash shape.
- [70:12]
Elon Lee
M dash. M dash for millennial. I like that.
- [70:16]
Pablo Holman
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. Yeah. So I can ask all the dumbest questions in the world because nobody. 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. You know, I'm working with actual astrophysicists who know about rockets, and I have to understand what does Delta V mean? And I'm, like, googling that 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.
- [71:21]
Tim Ferriss
It's my job to ask dumb questions. Yeah.
- [71:23]
Pablo Holman
And you get away with it, too.
- [71:24]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [71:24]
Pablo Holman
So that's. 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.
- [71:41]
Tim Ferriss
Okay. Zero Effect.
- [71:44]
Elon Lee
Oh, man.
- [71:44]
Tim Ferriss
What is Zero Effect? You and Alon Lee are both fans of Zero Effect, okay. And I've never seen it. What is Zero Effect?
- [71:52]
Pablo Holman
I thought I got this from him.
- [71:54]
Elon Lee
But he says he got it from me.
- [71:55]
Pablo Holman
This is a, like a philosophy that drives me.
- [71:59]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [71:59]
Pablo Holman
So there was a film called the Zero Effect that was like, Ben stiller.
- [72:03]
Tim Ferriss
Made it 20 years ago, so 1998. Okay.
- [72:06]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [72:15]
Elon Lee
He's a private detective who never leaves his home. So he stays home and he cracks every case. But he explains how he does it.
- [72:22]
Tim Ferriss
Which is that it's like the fantasy of every millennial on screens right now.
- [72:25]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, right.
- [72:26]
Elon Lee
Well, here's how to do it, guys. If you lose your keys and you.
- [72:30]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [72:44]
Elon Lee
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.
- [72:51]
Pablo Holman
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 a like 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 you know, by the time we invest, I'm convinced and I understand enough that it's like, okay, it sounds crazy but isn't. You know, by now I'm in the business of things that sound like complete bullshit but aren't right. I have to be right enough times that they're not. But I gotta 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 you know, 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.
- [73:57]
Elon Lee
So I do well, or at least a lot of them. So you know, if one of them.
- [74:02]
Pablo Holman
Works, I'll have it.
- [74:03]
Elon Lee
So that's kind of the game.
- [74:04]
Pablo Holman
And I think more people would get something out of that approach to life than the opposite, which is much more common, which is, you know, people are trying so hard to be so sure and be right all the time, and they really aren't anyway. 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 know, you could just walk down the street, find a homeless dude, start telling him about self sailing cargo ships or nuclear reactors. You'd be like, oh, cool man. My college roommate is a astrophysicist and might be able to help you with that. Like everybody was in on it. Yeah, and I think they get a bit of that now with AI like, 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.
- [75:05]
Tim Ferriss
Is the movie worth watching or is it really just a philosophy?
- [75:09]
Pablo Holman
Oh, totally. Good movie.
- [75:10]
Elon Lee
It's a good movie.
- [75:11]
Pablo Holman
It's awesome. Go watch it. I mean, I don't even watch movies, but trust me, this one's good.
- [75:16]
Elon Lee
And War Games, those are the two movies in the world to watch.
- [75:18]
Pablo Holman
Everything else you can.
- [75:19]
Tim Ferriss
War Games the only defensible movie on hacking.
- [75:22]
Elon Lee
Only defensible hacker movie ever. I keep trying. I keep, you know, Hollywood calls me to put hackers in the movie, I keep trying to help them put legit hacking in the movies.
- [75:32]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [75:46]
Tim Ferriss
So what is Enhanced Photo?
- [75:49]
Elon Lee
Enhanced Photo, I know, enhance. It's such bullshit. Although Enhanced photo is working pretty well now.
- [75:54]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah, now it's a thing. So perpetual motion, folks. It's coming. You mentioned looking for keys. I just have to ask because I know that you're focused on deep jack, 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 in a one or two mile radius. Is this just a fairy tale?
- [76:25]
Pablo Holman
It's not a fairy tale. It was figured out by a hacker named Major Malfunction in England.
- [76:32]
Tim Ferriss
Great handle.
- [76:34]
Pablo Holman
And so 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 that the car is listening for that signal. When you build almost anything, you build it to do the thing, but you almost always build a little back door watch board games. Okay, so Major Malfunction, not through hacking, but by calling tech support for his. 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. And he explained this to me. And I don't know if he was drunk or what, but he probably shouldn't have.
- [77:22]
Tim Ferriss
And so Pablo's on the list.
- [77:25]
Elon Lee
Go by the dealership and you can open any.
- [77:30]
Pablo Holman
So that was just a. At the time, I wasn't going to say the name of the brand. But you did, so yeah, it was.
- [77:36]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, we can bleep it out.
- [77:37]
Elon Lee
One brand of cars can open any car from that manufacturer. I think they probably have fixed this.
- [77:43]
Pablo Holman
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, 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. 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, you know, reducing attack surface for vulnerabilities. So now that cars have system update, you know, 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.
- [78:20]
Tim Ferriss
Well, I guess it still is if you're going after vintage vehicles. Potentially, maybe.
- [78:25]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. I'm not going to tell you how to do it.
- [78:27]
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.
- [78:37]
Elon Lee
Oh, yeah.
- [78:38]
Tim Ferriss
I've spent a ton of time with Chris Young 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've bumped into him twice now. But met Neil Stevenson.
- [78:52]
Pablo Holman
Oh, yeah, good.
- [78:53]
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, delightful.
- [79:03]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [79:12]
Tim Ferriss
He's really into like Victorian era exercises, right?
- [79:15]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, right.
- [79:15]
Elon Lee
No, you got all, all the club bells and.
- [79:18]
Pablo Holman
And for a while was training with a Sherlock Holmes esque cane. I forgot what's, what's that called? Bartitsu. It's great. I mean, I really love Neil. He's delightful and. But he would spend about half his day writing in the morning and in the afternoon working on some, you know, crazy project. And I got to work on a lot of those with him.
- [79:38]
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 have 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?
- [80:12]
Pablo Holman
Well, that one, I would. I think it's a very important one because you sort of, like you said, sort of flippantly mentioned billionaires and people get pissed off about these folks as soon as they're rich just because they're rich or successful. But it often, what I see is it's blinding them, is 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, you know, we kind of need you to pay attention to them because for better or worse, more people probably listen to you than these billionaires.
- [80:47]
Elon Lee
And so you can save us get those lessons.
- [80:49]
Pablo Holman
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. Turn Earth into like a wildlife refuge that maybe you would visit once in a lifetime. You know, because this is an awesome, amazing and beautiful place and we don't want to it up too badly. So that sounds crazy. None of us are going to be around for that. But it might take thousands of years to craft that future for humanity. You know, in the best case scenario, Earth just melts into the sun. And that's if nothing else wipes us out in the meantime. So we gotta. If you believe in the sanctity of human life, you believe in 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. 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 a know anything about tech to answer that question.
- [83:09]
Tim Ferriss
As soon as you extend the horizon.
- [83:11]
Pablo Holman
You extend the horizon. In 100 years, anything could happen. In 100 years, the regulatory environment could change. Maris could be out of business, all the cabals could be out of business. You Know, whatever. All the things, any objection you have probably could be solved in 100 years. So then ask yourself, does it have to take a hundred 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 could do, you know, 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. Like, 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 think that I learned that from Jeff, you know, and you look at what, you know, even Amazon is doing, you know, 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. You know, 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, the Hoover Dam.
- [85:05]
Tim Ferriss
The Panama Canal, Empire State building was like 18 or 24 months or something. Insane, right?
- [85:11]
Pablo Holman
So what are we sitting on our thumbs for? Making more iPhone apps?
- [85:16]
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?
- [85:24]
Pablo 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, like let's build in less than 10 years, everything.
- [85:41]
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.
- [86:18]
Pablo Holman
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's done. I'm a little more. 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.
- [86:37]
Tim Ferriss
So 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.
- [86:43]
Elon Lee
Which I have done for my entire childhood. So, you know, Mars doesn't exactly appeal to me.
- [86:48]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [87:09]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I mean, he's a phenomenon.
- [87:10]
Pablo Holman
It's phenomenal. And we need to. Look, if you don't like Elon, fine, go show us how to do it better.
- [87:15]
Tim Ferriss
Well, you also don't like. You don't need to like everything about someone.
- [87:19]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, that's true.
- [87:20]
Tim Ferriss
Or admire everything about someone in order to recognize and potentially model some of the things that really do work.
- [87:28]
Pablo Holman
Well. I appreciate you demonstrating that by hanging out with me today. I got a glimpse of this from this thing that like a bunch of music artists did called the One Campaign, like U2 was doing it. And the idea behind the One Campaign, because they wanted to solve malaria, they want 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. That had a big impression on me because I think it is important, like 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 we need like a thousand elons. Maybe they don't all need X accounts, but we need a thousand Elons and we need them to go after all these things. And that's how we're gonna build the future.
- [88:49]
Tim Ferriss
So this is, this is from a New York Times article from 2018.
- [88:55]
Pablo Holman
Oh, man.
- [88:55]
Tim Ferriss
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 Conference. I don't even know if it still exists, but what was it like to attend that?
- [89:10]
Pablo Holman
Oh, yeah, well, Mars and what is it? So that's just a small event. So Jeff Bezos has that event annually. It's for machine learning, automation, robotics and space. 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 like probably the one person.
- [89:52]
Elon Lee
Who'S worked in all four of those things. Everybody else is usually like a Nobel.
- [89:56]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [90:06]
Elon Lee
It, which is great.
- [90:07]
Pablo Holman
And we get to cross pollinate these folks who really, you know, 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, you know, five or ten Nobel Prize winners and we don't even put them on stage. So it's a rarefied group. And I'm convinced that these things are so important because people need a community, you know, and we have 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 a, you know, 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 like 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, it's. Well, this is a good community Matters.
- [91:06]
Tim Ferriss
Good time to explain why the hell we're sitting where we're sitting. What is this location? Where are we?
- [91:12]
Pablo Holman
This place is so cool. So we are at the new lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And this is like nothing else even I know about. It's actually kind of like 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 a hundred beautiful, beautiful space. It's a beautiful space. It's, I think, a 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 new lab 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.
- [92:03]
Elon Lee
Even bigger and it's so cool and it's got space.
- [92:06]
Pablo Holman
So if you're trying to build something, go see new lab. 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.
- [92:17]
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 is 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 is easy to psyop. Then go out and left. And I'm like, building five psyop completed. And I'm out and walking left. We're going to come back to the psyop and use the big building straight ahead as 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. Like, where the hell am I going? He said, I'll come out and meet with the black van. And there was actually a black fan. And I'm like, wow, is this just.
- [93:16]
Elon Lee
Now you know why Elon Lee and I are friends?
- [93:20]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Yeah. I was like, you know, this is a coin toss. I have no idea what this. This could be the long con. This would be an amazing long con.
- [93:26]
Elon Lee
Well, my dating life has been very colorful because of every. You know, every girl is dating me, ends up meeting me at, like, some strange warehouse in the industrial district with, you know, wires hanging out of metal and.
- [93:40]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, so I remember, ages ago, when I. When it first came out, someone recommended that I read Kevin Mitnick's the Art of Deception.
- [93:51]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [93:51]
Tim Ferriss
Which you made a face.
- [93:53]
Pablo Holman
Oh, I did.
- [93:54]
Tim Ferriss
Shit.
- [93:54]
Elon Lee
Sorry.
- [93:55]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Okay. Tell me. Tell me what that's about.
- [93:56]
Pablo 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, you know, hackers kind of rallied around him because he was one of the first hackers to get thrown in jail. Most hackers, like, I don't know if you're elite. Kevin is kind of a joke because he was a good social engineer.
- [94:15]
Tim Ferriss
Well, that's why I bring it up, because you mentioned Psyop, and as far as I could tell, 90% of the book was social engineering.
- [94:22]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, that's his thing. And it's worth learning. I mean, that's a totally great thing. It's different than hacking.
- [94:27]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, but Psyop. Was that a joke, or is that something.
- [94:32]
Elon Lee
No, I had gone through Building 77, and I'm like, hey, going to new lab.
- [94:36]
Pablo Holman
And you just waved me through.
- [94:37]
Elon Lee
So that's what I just. I'm like, I think this is for you.
- [94:40]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, got it. All right.
- [94:42]
Elon Lee
Yeah.
- [94:43]
Tim Ferriss
Anyway, I want to ask you a bit more about China. So I used to. 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% of my time probably speaking Chinese. Resurrecting my Chinese right now. And that's actually an exaggeration, but it's like 10 to 20%, probably. And I have been so simultaneously impressed and terrified by China on so many different levels.
- [95:15]
Pablo Holman
You and me both.
- [95:16]
Tim Ferriss
And there was a book Tyler Cowen recommended. Great. Amazing. Guy everybody should check out. There's a book called Breakneck, 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, because 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?
- [96:18]
Pablo Holman
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.
- [96:28]
Elon Lee
So I've been doing that for five years.
- [96:30]
Tim Ferriss
Sounds more fun than memorizing characters.
- [96:32]
Elon Lee
Frankly, it's helped a ton. I really opened up my eyes to China. So, yeah, my fiance is Chinese, but.
- [96:39]
Pablo Holman
Been in America long enough that, 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.
- [96:52]
Tim Ferriss
But you have a unique multidisciplinary technical lens.
- [96:56]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, that includes deep tech. 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, because 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.
- [97:32]
Tim Ferriss
I mean, I use LLMs on a weekly basis for legal first passes already.
- [97:38]
Elon Lee
For lawsuits good.
- [97:39]
Tim Ferriss
No, for all my lawsuits. But I'll give you an example. I mean, this will 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. Oh, 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.
- [98:43]
Pablo 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, you know, if you're running a business, we build a computational model of your business. Now, not an LLM, but a. 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, because 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.
- [99:35]
Tim Ferriss
So if you haven't seen this, it didn't get as much airtime as I would have expected. But Abu Dhabi is implementing that right now. That's right for legislation.
- [99:46]
Pablo Holman
It's unbelievable.
- [99:47]
Tim Ferriss
And it seems like there were a lot of people who poked fun at it. Where I saw a lot of people 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.
- [100:00]
Pablo Holman
That's right.
- [100:00]
Tim Ferriss
It's remarkable what they're already doing.
- [100:04]
Pablo 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 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 like a Netflix series where, like, every episode shows something amazing.
- [100:57]
Elon Lee
From China that sucks in the U.S. you know, I just think that's the.
- [101:01]
Pablo Holman
Kind of story people need to get in their head just to see that contrast and realize, like, we're not playing in the major leagues in a lot of things, so we need to step up. And I, I think, you know, there's a lot that's impressive about China. I obviously I'm on Alaskan, which is like a supercharged American, so. Look, I think, though, 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, or 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. Like, they don't make room for that and it's hurting their ability to do new things. Now they're kicking ass by just waiting for us to figure 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.
- [102:24]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, very curious to see where it all goes.
- [102:26]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, me too.
- [102:28]
Tim Ferriss
They're moving at remarkable speed with implementation on so many fronts.
- [102:32]
Pablo Holman
And that's. It's great for humanity. 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, you know, I don't know, like, making global trade possible with our Navy or something. But, you know, there's also a lot of accolades that I think we're not giving to China that we should.
- [102:53]
Tim Ferriss
So I want to get your take. I wasn't planning on asking this, but yeah, 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 Cultural 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 nonviolently, 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, all of it wrong. But what's all of it? It's like 30x300x 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 specific 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. 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, like weaponized marine vessels. Do you think there's a there there?
- [104:53]
Pablo Holman
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 Anderals. I'm not the guy who should weigh in on the geopolitics of Taiwan, but I think, you know, 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 like American schools is that they were the whole structure was invented to make factory workers after the war. Well, now that we need some factory workers, where are they? Like, we don't have them. What we've got are like only fans, creators. So could some of them maybe help us out in a factory? You know, we need to build a lot of things and I think if you look around, we're just miscalibrated. You know, you and I barely have to work. You don't know any. Most 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 when, you know, how long is the line at Starbucks. You know, know, it's just not even close. So I think we need to recalibrate on our expectation of what it means to work. 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 need 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.
- [106:28]
Tim Ferriss
You.
- [106:29]
Pablo Holman
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 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 it 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 like, see, yeah, I helped that person today, you know. Are nurses depressed? They might be depressed about having to do a lot of paperwork, but they're probably not depressed about their work.
- [107:16]
Tim Ferriss
The meeting again, I don't mean to.
- [107:18]
Pablo Holman
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 that, where we can see how it helps our world, helps our society. So building stuff is a good example of that because you can build a thing and you can see, I built that thing and somebody's get using it. And that's awesome. Like, are Tesla factory workers depressed? I don't know. Or maybe swap out depressed for disgruntled or apathetic or something. You know, you can solve some of these things. So I want to see us build. And I think Andrew is an example of like, we're going to build these things that help us. You know, I want to build those ships. We can build chips.
- [107:57]
Tim Ferriss
He's a machine. I mean, he's, he's an impressive.
- [107:59]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. And we can impressive founder and so are other people there. We can build chip fabs. You know, you don't necessarily need tiny fingers. It's not a lot of stories we've been told. We can build chip fabs. We can learn to work. But you get the idea, like, let's build some cool. 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.
- [108:20]
Tim Ferriss
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 in the DeLorean with the crazy hair? As I heard you say once, honeypot.
- [108:32]
Elon Lee
Means something else to hackers. So I'll go with like lightning rod. Yeah, you just look for the crazy.
- [108:39]
Pablo Holman
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, 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 have been really helpful with, but it's too late. That is frustrating.
- [109:10]
Tim Ferriss
Too late in terms of stage meaning.
- [109:13]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, we're basically helpful at the beginning. You know, we're helpful in the early stages when you got to get out of that garage or get out of that lab and become more maybe venture compatible. You know, we're trying to help people co opt the machinery of venture capital and aim at deep tech. And so if you're kind of on that track, we could maybe be helpful. Not for everyone, but, you know, that's what I'm looking for. And. And so, yeah, I would love to see these especially the breakthroughs really early.
- [109:41]
Tim Ferriss
But I guess is your game to attract them to you or do you go out and search?
- [109:45]
Pablo Holman
I do still, you know, like dark.
- [109:46]
Tim Ferriss
Corners of nerd Dom.
- [109:48]
Elon Lee
Yeah.
- [109:48]
Pablo Holman
But I still need help. I need to deputize my friends. There's probably like VCs hanging out at Starbucks by MIT. But those professors call me when they have something that their postdocs 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 another third is like 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 like the crazy hackers who are in a basement. You just can't find them. They're not going to Ted or whatever.
- [110:29]
Tim Ferriss
Rocky Mullen Wasn't going to TED when he was a teenager.
- [110:32]
Elon Lee
Yeah, Rodney's not going to ted. That's right. He spoke at a couple of TED events, I think.
- [110:38]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, but I mean, when he was like, the undiscovered.
- [110:41]
Pablo Holman
I know, right? Yeah.
- [110:42]
Tim Ferriss
Where does salsa enter the picture?
- [110:44]
Pablo Holman
Oh, my God.
- [110:45]
Tim Ferriss
Because it seems to be important to you.
- [110:48]
Pablo Holman
Well, it is important to me, actually. It's so. I remember the tango thing that you did that I read about. And you and I have a radically different relationship to dance. I can't do things that are choreographed. I can't memorize things. I can't focus on, like, 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. That's literally how I learned to dance. So I'm a really good salsa dancer now because I started 20 years ago.
- [111:30]
Elon Lee
But very unorthodox salsa dancer, which, to be fair to my partners, I should say that because I don't dance like.
- [111:38]
Pablo Holman
Everyone else and I can't learn to dance like someone else. I have to try this stuff and then converge on what works. That's a really great thing. But I, you know, so I dance differently than everyone else. But, yeah, salsa for me was very important because. Partly because too much of my life was hanging out with hackers who fit a demographic that's, like, a little too homogenous in its way. Maybe not intellectually, but certainly by all other metrics. So I had trained in aikido for, like, a decade, which is a Japanese martial art. Very structured, very disciplined, very traditional. I'm obsessed with the physical communication. I love that part of it. And what's cool about Aikido is you always train with a partner. And that's not true for, like, a lot of martial arts. You know, 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. You know, 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 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.
- [113:08]
Elon Lee
So I'm still basically doing the same thing as aikido, but in salsa. And I can do it any night.
- [113:13]
Pablo Holman
Anywhere in the world. There's salsa dancers.
- [113:16]
Elon Lee
You just got to know where to find them. You don't need to speak the language.
- [113:19]
Pablo Holman
And so I got a lot out of dancing salsa. I got a community of people in all walks of life. I'm not a rock star in salsa, you know, I get outranked by the Mexican dishwasher every night. It's good for my ego because 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. So anyway, I've been doing that for a long time.
- [113:47]
Tim Ferriss
Salsa has a huge advantage over tango that you can find it anywhere. Tango is pretty narrow, 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.
- [114:03]
Pablo Holman
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 I just. In salsa, you can just wiggle your way through it. So.
- [114:21]
Tim Ferriss
So to actually implement the trial and error.
- [114:24]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [114:24]
Tim Ferriss
Trying everything and throwing out what doesn't work for you.
- [114:27]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [114:27]
Tim Ferriss
How do you even figure out the menu of options that you need to run through from A to Z?
- [114:33]
Pablo Holman
Well, again, you're going back to the Tim Ferriss learning style. I'm not trying to codify the menu. I'm discovery mode.
- [114:41]
Tim Ferriss
Okay. Yeah. I'm just wondering, like, 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?
- [114:53]
Pablo Holman
So in salsa, the first, like, 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, learning 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 like, the day I could get out of anything, I could get myself Into. Because in salsa, you're like turning a girl into a pretzel and then untying her at like 180 miles an hour. Once I realized, okay, I know how to get out of every possible thing that I can get into every failure.
- [115:24]
Tim Ferriss
Mode I know how to get out.
- [115:25]
Pablo Holman
Of, 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. 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 like this vocabulary of like bizarre salsa moves that I can do with a partner who's never learned those moves because I'm leading her through it. And I know what I'm. I can feel it all. So that's what happened to me. And that's pretty heterodox, but that's what I meant.
- [116:00]
Tim Ferriss
We may have more overlap than you realize. Just in the sense that I had. When I first got to Argentina in 2004, 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 started co founded the first hip hop dance troupe at Princeton University. Wow. And so breakdancing, that's all I had. Which was improvised.
- [116:47]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. Okay, cool.
- [116:48]
Tim Ferriss
I 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. Right. 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 all of this cold air. I could see it just billowing out the ac. And so I walked in there and it was just killing time. And this older woman, like 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. 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.
- [118:22]
Pablo Holman
Let's go.
- [118:23]
Tim Ferriss
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 3pm or something. And it was nine smoking hot women and one bored looking guy who was 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. Now this is interesting. Now this is interesting. And it was actually not for me, aikido, but wrestling, believe it or not, and judo. That helped because it's the same. Same. 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 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.
- [119:17]
Elon Lee
I still do.
- [119:17]
Tim Ferriss
Oh my God. Yeah.
- [119:20]
Pablo Holman
It's such a good story.
- [119:21]
Tim Ferriss
It's a good, very humbling experience for me.
- [119:24]
Pablo Holman
It was the exact same thing because I went to this Argentine steakhouse and there was these pros direct from Argentina that danced between the tables and up on the bar. And I saw he's leading her. But the communication was so subtle. I realized that's what aikidoka are trying to do and they're better at it.
- [119:41]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [119:42]
Pablo Holman
And so I went to try to learn from them. And then. Yeah.
- [119:44]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [119:59]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [120:00]
Tim Ferriss
Dance with one another. Because if I took you to La Viruta or Nino Bien or one of these milonga in Argentina during kind of prime time, which would be like 2am or 3am, I don't know how they get it.
- [120:13]
Pablo Holman
Dancers don't show up till midnight.
- [120:14]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, they show up really late.
- [120:16]
Elon Lee
I never go out till midnight.
- [120:17]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [120:28]
Pablo Holman
There you go. There you go.
- [120:29]
Tim Ferriss
So unbelievable. 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.
- [120:44]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, I can do that. I'll do that to salsa dancers. Salsa is super fast.
- [120:48]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, salsa's a lot. Well, tango can get fast, but salsa is, like, dependably fast.
- [120:53]
Pablo Holman
Yeah. So I got very fast music. The steps are fast, and there's a lot of spinning and shit. And so I'll close in partner's eyes because I can lead her. 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 dancer, especially if they're uptight, because, like, 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 could get her eyes closed, and I can even. And you won't know. She can spin with her eyes closed.
- [121:33]
Tim Ferriss
And I remember also one of the aspects of my tango immersion, because I went 110%, I just fully committed. I mean, my feet ended up. 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.
- [121:53]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [121:53]
Tim Ferriss
It was a lot of fun to dissect that and explore and try everything. And one of the aspects I so loved was. And I imagine this is true in salsa maybe, is that you'd go out to these different milonga, these different dance halls. Everyone had its own personality, right? Yeah. There'd be one. I remember, I think it's in the basement of, like, the Armenian consulate.
- [122:18]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [122:18]
Tim Ferriss
Filled with smoke, which I can actually tolerate in that environment. Everyone's sweating.
- [122:23]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [122:23]
Tim Ferriss
And it's got kind of an illegal speakeasy type of feel.
- [122:27]
Pablo Holman
Yep.
- [122:28]
Tim Ferriss
Definitely a fire hazard.
- [122:29]
Pablo Holman
Totally.
- [122:30]
Tim Ferriss
Then there's another one, Sundarland, which was basically in a high school gymnasium on a basketball court. Just blindingly bright lights.
- [122:41]
Pablo Holman
Okay.
- [122:42]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [123:02]
Elon Lee
What was your violation?
- [123:04]
Tim Ferriss
Well, my violation was very basic. It is very common. 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 are. Yeah, yeah, they're very much like, at least in the capital city, very much like Italians. Like, 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. And then you're like, wow, I'm a Jedi, I'm doing so well. And you go out and you do it with a stranger. And literally I had women say to me, they're like, they throw their arms down and discuss 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.
- [125:04]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [125:04]
Tim Ferriss
And then I would put my tail between my legs and like scuttle off and recover.
- [125:10]
Pablo 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, you know, there'll be Incompatible dancers. And my problem is. So I'm training what's called essentially like LA style, West coast salsa. Salsa actually comes from New York City.
- [125:31]
Tim Ferriss
New York City, Yeah.
- [125:32]
Pablo Holman
I live in the epicenter of salsa. But they dance what's called mambo. They can see me coming from miles away. I'm like an invasive species. They're like, oh my God, what is this trash? You know? 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 just, you know, I have to somehow whitewash myself of this. The filth from the west coast salsa scene.
- [126:02]
Tim Ferriss
The tango world also has its factions, so every subculture needs. It's infighting.
- [126:08]
Elon Lee
Exactly.
- [126:08]
Tim Ferriss
So there's definitely a fair amount of that. And I brought up the older guys, like 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 gonna 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.
- [126:34]
Pablo Holman
Oh yeah.
- [126:35]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [127:06]
Pablo Holman
Yes, the musicality. The musicality, exactly is what matters. And same in salsa and it's derivatives.
- [127:15]
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?
- [127:28]
Pablo 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 brainwash my partners into doing the thing I want to do.
- [127:44]
Elon Lee
And you got to find a certain special kind of partner that can hang.
- [127:47]
Pablo Holman
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? I have that conversation, 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 rarefied partner that will put up with my flavor of bullshit. Yeah. So it's a evolution.
- [128:26]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Pablo, we covered a lot of ground. We could, of course, 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?
- [128:39]
Pablo Holman
Oh, wow.
- [128:40]
Tim Ferriss
Anything at all? I have a few closing questions as well.
- [128:42]
Pablo Holman
Okay.
- [128:42]
Tim Ferriss
I'm just wondering if anything comes to mind.
- [128:45]
Pablo Holman
You know, 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're maybe 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, like, 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? You know, are you just doom scrolling? Because we could do a lot better than that. And so I think that's. If I had a chance to, like, try and share something, it would be that, like, There's a lot left to do.
- [130:18]
Tim Ferriss
That is a military helicopter that just flew over us.
- [130:21]
Pablo Holman
Oh, yeah, you're trained in military helicopters.
- [130:24]
Tim Ferriss
Great.
- [130:24]
Pablo Holman
We can rewind.
- [130:25]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, no, no, I'm good, I'm good. I just wanted to say this is. This is a lively environment. I like it. Those people.
- [130:31]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [130:32]
Tim Ferriss
Let's say there are at least a handful listening who resonate with what you just said.
- [130:37]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [130:37]
Tim Ferriss
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 people to do?
- [130:46]
Elon Lee
Yeah, carefully, I ask for.
- [130:48]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I'd be careful with the email.
- [130:49]
Pablo Holman
But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I try to read every email. I already. I can't write, apply 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.
- [131:03]
Elon Lee
Things and help out a little bit.
- [131:04]
Pablo Holman
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. Like, you don't have to be a physicist to do it. You could find some important things and some really lucrative things to invest in in Deep Tech, and you won't be competing with all the other usual suspects.
- [131:32]
Tim Ferriss
I've made that shift largely in my own investing in the last five years.
- [131:36]
Pablo Holman
Wow, cool. Oh, yeah, I know we can cut this out, but you're an investor in Holobiome. Yeah, that's one that we did.
- [131:43]
Elon Lee
Super cool.
- [131:43]
Tim Ferriss
Holobiome is amazing.
- [131:44]
Pablo Holman
It is.
- [131:45]
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.
- [131:52]
Pablo Holman
Yes.
- [131:53]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. 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.
- [132:04]
Elon Lee
Yeah.
- [132:05]
Pablo Holman
What people don't realize is that. Well, just to make it clear to the audience, you know, 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 gonna 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. LE mechanism do that. And it's exciting because they're figuring out cool stuff already.
- [132:47]
Tim Ferriss
Super cool company. Yeah. I've been getting very involved with aquaculture, algae feed additives for cows to reduce methane production, which is frankly very far outside of my comfort zone. I hope to have positive return on investment, but I tend to get myself sometimes into trouble. For instance, I invested in a company that was developing 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. Yeah, I end up with a lot of zeros when I stray outside of stuff that I can directly promote to my audience. Right. Because I can increase the value of equity.
- [133:41]
Pablo Holman
Right.
- [133:42]
Tim Ferriss
And a company very clearly or a blue bottle coffee or fill in the blank. But that makes sense nonetheless. I have been as an intrepid deep tech investor because a lot of it just seems more meaningful if it works.
- [133:58]
Pablo Holman
Right. So the trick there's you know, most, I'm sure you know by now what like 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, you know, that's why we focus on being the first check, doing pre seed stuff, actual tech. We'll do hundreds of these things, you.
- [134:22]
Elon Lee
Know and we're going to hope to get a couple hits over the course.
- [134:25]
Tim Ferriss
Of a single 10 year fund.
- [134:26]
Pablo 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 we're not. Most VCs would kind of like graduate from pre seed to seed to series A. We don't do that. We just stay super early. Lots and lots of pre seed.
- [134:44]
Tim Ferriss
So yeah, if you could only place one bet in fusion, where would you place it?
- [134:50]
Pablo Holman
Oh boy, don't get me started. Okay, I'm started.
- [134:55]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [134:55]
Elon Lee
Okay.
- [134:56]
Tim Ferriss
Fusion or would your S should be zero?
- [134:58]
Pablo Holman
It's not zero. So here's the thing. So fusion as you know fission is like rattle these molecules and get them break apart and get a bunch of energy out. Fusion is 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 gonna heat up these molecules so much that they kind of expand and open up to the possibility of getting stuck.
- [135:27]
Tim Ferriss
Together, create a miniature sun.
- [135:29]
Pablo Holman
No big deal is temperatures that rival the sun because that is what the sun is doing is 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 is so hot it melts anything on earth. So the way we do it now the best idea so far has been what's called 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. So that's the using the 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've 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 togamak, which is like the giant donut shaped thing you see pictures of. And I wish them a lot of luck, but they have extreme engineering problems. Like it is really hard to build that thing and once they get it built and 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.
- [137:34]
Elon Lee
Tritium is, you guessed it, in a fusion reactor where they've got to get.
- [137:38]
Pablo Holman
Like 99% efficiency on getting the tritium out. We don't know if that's going to be possible. So there's like just a zillion of these really hard engineering problems.
- [137:46]
Tim Ferriss
So anyway, that's Just source the tritium from gun sites.
- [137:49]
Pablo 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 is there's very little of it left because tritium paint and in your old Swiss watches and things, 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 like a gas tank. You have to fill once and it runs the rest.
- [138:21]
Tim Ferriss
What is that? Q greater than 1?
- [138:23]
Pablo Holman
Q greater than 1 is the metric.
- [138:26]
Tim Ferriss
Has anyone.
- [138:26]
Pablo 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, you know, fusion works from Livermore or whatever. And what they've done is on System Level 1, which basically means the energy going into the fusion from like 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. 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 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 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 nano confinement 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 is 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 physicists you know will tell you that Pavlos is full of shit, which is fine, but that's the kind of, you know, wild ideas that we think are worth pursuing if we can. And so there's a important inflection point there where we were able to see this works in the lab. Can we commercialize it?
- [140:38]
Tim Ferriss
So as long as you are not completely insane and you have some degree of technical due diligence given the way you're investing. Right. If you were investing at Series D, 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 pre seed, that's your maximum downside risk.
- [141:04]
Pablo Holman
Then it's like, okay, 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.
- [141:17]
Tim Ferriss
Which 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.
- [141:41]
Pablo 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.
- [142:17]
Tim Ferriss
It's interesting because you have the opposite problem of a lot of venture capitalists.
- [142:20]
Pablo Holman
That's right, I do.
- [142:21]
Tim Ferriss
Right.
- [142:21]
Pablo Holman
And I know that you're not looking.
- [142:22]
Tim Ferriss
For technical co founders.
- [142:24]
Pablo Holman
Every other VC will tell you we back the best founders. That's their mantra. And I get it. And increasingly I am, I'm sympathetic. You know, I have backed founders who I, because I love the tech, but they just, they spent their career on the tech. They're only making a business because it's the next logical step.
- [142:43]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [142:48]
Pablo Holman
Yeah.
- [142:49]
Tim Ferriss
If they try to spearhead both sides of that coin, they're going to burn out totally.
- [142:54]
Pablo Holman
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. Like, 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 in, you know, 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 got to find the people who are good at things you suck at. My founders often suck at marketing. They suck at business development. 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.
- [143:52]
Elon Lee
I believe in do the thing you're good at.
- [143:55]
Pablo Holman
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 like co founder dating for deep tech. I want that solved desperately. There are more entrepreneurs than there are inventors. I 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 Pablo.
- [144:20]
Tim Ferriss
Where should people find you online? What are the best websites or otherwise?
- [144:24]
Pablo Holman
I have a deepfuture tech is our website. There's a podcast there which is mostly just long conversations with nerds. That's how I learned. So I pick the brains of nerds and record some of them and then I'm on all the stuff. Like, you know, I'm Pablo's on X, but nobody listens to me there. I'm LinkedIn. More people listen. So you could do those things. Oh, I have a really good. 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 they can find.
- [144:58]
Tim Ferriss
That at the Deep Future.
- [145:00]
Pablo Holman
Yeah, that's there. There's a WhatsApp group with propaganda enjoying that too.
- [145:06]
Tim Ferriss
And if people are interested in the book, which I have in my backpack right now, it's deep creating technology that matters. A lot of good stories and a lot of head spinning statistics.
- [145:18]
Pablo Holman
Oh, no, don't say that.
- [145:20]
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 five out of every six dollars associated with shipping going to fuel or whatever the number might be, and so on. I mean, it's really remarkable.
- [145:42]
Pablo Holman
The statistics are. You know, those are meant to be drop kicks.
- [145:47]
Tim Ferriss
Well, Pablo, thank you for taking the time. So great to hang.
- [145:50]
Pablo Holman
No, this is awesome.
- [145:51]
Elon Lee
I'm glad we finally got to do it.
- [145:52]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, super fun after all these years.
- [145:54]
Pablo Holman
And I came unarmed, so I wouldn't intimidate your sensibility about getting hacked.
- [146:01]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, black van's still out front, so it ain't over until it's over. And for everybody listening, we will link to all the things we mentioned, including Pablo's website, the book newsletter, et cetera, at Tim Blog Podcast. You can just. I can guarantee you that Pablo will be the only Pablos. So just search Pablo. That's true.
- [146:21]
Pablo Holman
Sounds plural.
- [146:22]
Tim Ferriss
But there's only one, and you will find him immediately.
- [146:25]
Pablo Holman
So.
- [146:26]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [146:39]
Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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Tim Ferriss
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Tim Ferriss
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Tim Ferriss
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Tim Ferriss (Host - Sponsor Reads)
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- [151:35]
Tim Ferriss
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