#827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/1152cc76f09e776f

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out how they do what they do. My guest today
Terrified me so much when I first saw him in person, Pablos Holman, that I effectively avoided him for fifteen years. Although we've crossed paths and now we are friendly, but I saw him stealing.
few dozen credit card numbers from people on the front row of an event using hacking technology. And I thought, you know what?
Maybe I should just keep my distance. Pablo Solman is a hacker and inventor and the best selling author of Deep Future Creating Technology That Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. And we'll talk all about what that means previously.
Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin, you know that thing might be Jeff Bezos, 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 K.
Gates. Pablos hosts the Deep Future podcast, and his TED Talks have been viewed more than thirty million times. He's also a 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 to ask a lot of questions that were
This was a bit from behind the scenes, which I really enjoyed. So you can find all thingsPablos at deep future.tech. You can find him on X at
Pablos.
Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Can I answer your personal question?
No, I'm just seeing it. What if I did the eyes?
My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal empost galaxy.
No
Where to begin, Pablos. I don't even know where to start.
But I will start perhaps with
My first glimpse of Pablos.
Which was circa two thousand eight.
I
Think.
It was the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
It could have been Google at night.
But it was a demonstration. And I remember watching you
Let me actually take it to Wired magazine for a second.

This is what they wrote about this particular event.
San Diego, California, your credit card, the lock on your front door, your cellphone's voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think.
As Pablo Solman, 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 ATT 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 Forest.
While he sat helpless.
In a back row. Maybe that's why I'm confusing with Google Ignite, because Brady also did.
Google at night at one point.
Don't chuckle too much.
The hack works for all
Many A T and T users, including anyone with an iPhone.
Holman continued to show how
Slege? Is that how you say that?
Schlag 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 CNN Money.com to load a modified onion story.
Saying that iTunes store would soon be selling Tim O'Reilly's home movies for one ninety nine apiece.
Yeah.
Then I'm just gonna paraphrase here in the interest of time.
Called up a volunteer. This one, young man sporting a headband, also had an RFID enabled credit card. Holman waved a magic reader over the kid's pocket.
Up pop the kids' credit card number and expiration date on the projection screen.
With a few digits X'd out.
Turns out that after months of trying to figure out how to break the encrypted information transferred by the card, Holman just bought a merchant card reader on ebay.
For eight dollars. 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.

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. It was wild times.
Yeah.
Wild times. So
I just wanna 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 question mark.
Key Chan unlocking
Within a square mile question mark.
Hardware in a car in Seattle downloading and reuploading 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 facts?
There's something
factual about all of them, but certainly something must be exaggerated. Certainly something must be exaggerated.
Well, we will find out. Let's begin with
question around this term hacker.
All right. What is a hacker to you? And do you consider yourself a hacker?
Well
I'm a hacker because
My early life was all around
reverse engineering a computer.
And that was sort of a out of necessity because I grew up in Alaska.
And there was nobody around who'd ever seen a computer, but I got one when I was like nine years old. One of the first couple thousand Apple Two's 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 c I don't know a couple of decades of my career was all about trying to do new things with computers and
And advanced computers and
I didn't have any formal training, I didn't
Go to college.
Software development was invented long after I got started. So
There's a lot I
didn't get that most people get. And so a hacker
is somebody who I think
is attracted to puzzles.
They
are attracted to computer security'cause it's a bottomless pit of puzzles.
And I am trying at this point hack everything but computers.
And I'm trying to rescue hackers out of the
computer security department and get'em into
You know, helping
Go attack bigger problems.
How did you end up
Acquiring a computer.
So my dad had put some of the first
you know, mainframes in the oil industry.
And the
early seventies, let's say.
So he kinda he wasn't a 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'cause 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 Two's.
So I'm like
you know, nine, ten, eleven years old.
At Apple Two.
I had a skateboard.
People
We're 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 two isn't very powerful and at the in those days comput. You know, it didn't have hardly any memory.
It was super slow.
But I was lit up and so I try 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
Is that what they called it back then? It made an impression, just not the one that, you know, maybe I was going for. So I'm still doing that. Yeah, I'm still trying to
Convince people.
That these technologies are important.
So I'm trying to pull from your book, which I've been
Devouring.
Deep future, creating technology that matters.
About three quarters of the way through.
And
I'm gonna do something dangerous'cause I just got a
off of opioid painkillers for my arm surgery. Try to pull from memory. Way to go.
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? 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?
Yeah.
And they're
Starting from a completely different position. They're gonna take out the screws, break it into a lot of pieces. You've met Sammy. Yeah. He's the
poster child for this, you know. He's violating the warranty before he got the shrink wrap off.
Amazing adventures and
Crime and punishment involving MySpace. He is super delightful human.
What did he do with Google Maps? Oh, Google Maps is one of my favorite things he did.
Early on.
Sammy was finally allowed to use computers again.
And um
You figure you know, Google colors the roads based on for traffic. Sure. 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.
Because it they look like they're
All road jams. 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'em.

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What makes for
A good hacker.
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.
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. Yeah in 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 gonna 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.
Kind of hacker magic show.
Stealing people's passwords.
But some magicians, actual magicians showed up
In my audience one time.
And they explained to me
Like, hey, you kinda suck as a magician. I'm like
You could probably tell me what I should do.
And what I realized is magicians getting to know them are like these people who will spend an ex 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. They're
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 gonna 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 were 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 and the wrestling thing is and all 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. Right. Outside of software. Yeah.
Well thank you for saying that. Yeah. That's a huge compliment coming from you. And
Also
A very smooth segue because you mentioned two things that were of questionable value when you were a kid.
Computers. Yeah.
And skateboards. Yeah.
Rodney Mullen. Could you describe for people who Rodney Mullin is?
Oh man. So Rodney Mullen
I don't have to describe for anyone who ever w 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 all the 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 a 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.
І кін спен манс
Every night.
Trying to make it happen.
On a skateboard?
And then finally get it.
Did he grow up in Santa Monica? No, he grew up in rural Florida. So we have this kind of odd parallel childhood.
I mean
Roddy 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.
Yeah. So he invented
What
was possible. And and so I think that is so important. So it's kind of analogous to my Apple two, an Alaska thing.
But
What's so cool about it is that once Rodney
Does a new trick.
Puts it on YouTube.
Two weeks later, kids in Kazakhstan are doing it better than him.
And so it's a very important contrast.
I think to show people
The difference between what an inventor does
The first time
The zero to one that first time is incredibly hard. It takes lifetimes, it takes careers, it takes
Everything you've got to do something the first time that humans have never seen before.
Every time after that, the second time to the nth time.
That's craft.
That is not invention.
That's not art, that's craft.
You know, you need a skill to do it, right? 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 inventor.
It's not a legitimate career choice. I only know one person, a guy named Stephen Key, who is just prolific in the toy world, but Okay, cool. He's the only he's literally the only one. But how many
music artists could you name?
Yeah.
Oh 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've got to fix that.
I wanna dive into some of the the personal because some of the magic tricks
So to speak.
I wanna
Try to unpack a bit. Sure. And it might be pearls before swine because I'm not technical.

But I am curious, for instance
This
Robot. I don't remember its name.
Oh the hacker bot.
The hacker bar.
With the printer attached, right? Did I.
Okay, what did it do? It had a screen, not a screen. Okay. How did that work? Okay.
So what did it do? Maybe you could describe it. So in it's like t uh a long time ago.
So Eric Johansson is kinda 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 h teenagers making robots that
They turned into like a spectator sport.
And we realise like, Oh, these kids are making robots. If they can do it, we should be able to do it'cause we're
Super geniuses with a machine shop. I had the Blue Origin machine shop.
So I figure we could
We could build a robot.
So we started you know
Like Eric is amazing, you know, you come up with an idea
Still smoke cigarettes and stay up all night and get it done while I go to sleep.
And so Eric. Yeah, a great friend to have. So Eric
Start
Trying to get PWM controls and all the stuff to build a robot.
I bought the wheels, you know, I'm real'cause
I'm good at buying wheels.
You know, we started building this thing kind of, you know
Assembling it as it goes. These are robots for a competition? No, we just were making a robot for no good reason. I got it. I got it. And eventually we figured out it should have a reason.
So we're like, Well what should our robot do? Neither of us drink beer, so it didn't need to fetch beer. We're like, Well
We could make it do some hacking since that's what we're normally doing.
So it became the hacker bot and um
Everything that robot can do.
A nerd with a
Linux T shirt.
And a laptop can do.
So we made the robot so it would drive around
And it would find people
Who kind of like triangulate Wi Fi users. At a conference.
Anywhere. Yeah.
Drive up to them.
And then show them their passwords on the screen.
'Cause you know, we had all the tools for cracking. This is a wife password. Yeah, we're cracking Wi Fi at the time one of our buddies had made a
tool called Air Snort to crack wifi and we were
Cracking wifi and stealing passwords for fun.
But the cool thing about the hacker bot was it was just
insanely media genic kind of thing where everybody thought it was cute.
It's a nefarious robot stealing your passwords, but people thought it was cute.
So we realized we could
In those days we were just trying to raise the alarm about how insecure everything was, and nobody gave a shit about it. No one wanted to hear from hackers.
But
Yeah.
Hackerbot.
kind of got on television and that kind of thing. And so
We learned something from that.
How to contextualize the the lesson.
I made a lot of friends stealing passwords too. Yeah, they're like
Wow. Yeah.
Gotta keep your
prospective enemies as close as possible. Well, honestly, I'm not gonna 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 I was very, very nervous.
Fair enough that you're not the only one. Um
And I tend to tilt a little dystopian, so I'll just
Disclose that in advance.
That
If you are a legitimate target
It was non technical. Yeah.
very competent hacker that you're
Goose is cooked. I'm sure there are.
basic digital hygiene things that you can do. You've heard of it. 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 gonna get your stuff.
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 kinda say doesn't really count.
I mean it sucks, but
That's
All the st 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 an egg new exploit, like say you've I've got a way of hacking an iPhone.
That is so valuable.
I'm gonna save it for a really, really, really good
Use, right? Yeah.
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 gonna have a problem.
What does the marketplace look like for zero day exploits, right? Because I've heard of say Israeli developers formerly of intelligence.
Yeah. 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 two million dollars a pop.
for specific targets or something like that. But how does that transaction actually take place?
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? Which means you don't have to click on it.
Right. It means I send you a text message or something and I'm in and I control your phone.
That is very hard to do. Apple's trying to keep that from happening.
But if I have that
Then I sell it to a broker.
So there are certain hackers whose job is to vet these things. Those are the brokers. Yeah, the brokers. Do you find those people on the dark web or is it like a like a referral of a lot of things? Actually, some of them will I think these days they'll hang out a shingle. I'm not gonna name any here, but but the point is you could
Packers 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 all only people they'll sell to because otherwise they risk getting prosecuted
in different jurisdictions. So they can get away with selling two
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 w how I can use that to
Get Bitcoin wallets or something.
Love Romania, by the way.
I do too. Yeah. Love it's just there if you're amazing hacker. Uh go to Brashov if you have the chance, folks. Also, little known fact, lots of bears in Romania.
I find that to be I find I find that to be an a appealing draw, but it bears a wall. That's just me.
In any case.
Are there pockets of
Incredible hacker density, geographically speaking.
For whatever reason like 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. Yeah. 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.
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 past tense.
I don't know now'cause I 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 and
No, we could blow their minds a little, but they could blow our minds a lot. And so
That was cool. But what happened is
In the
early two thousands
Microsoft started to get serious about
Computer security.
And they start to import hackers to Seattle from everywhere.
I was in Seattle at the time.
Again.
graduating out of
hacking and computer stuff and to 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.
Must have been fun grabbing dinner or drinks with that crew afterwards. Yeah, that's what we were doing. It was it was actually it was funny because
In the same era
Dodgeball came out, which is like this.
Pre iPhone
Location about the movie with Ben Still. Not the movie. This is an app.
Before four square. It's like the predecessor to four square. And so you send a text to this
one number and then it would go to all your friends.
And so
You'd send this text in like
I'm at the bar.
And immediately like a hundred friends that get the text and then like, I'll go to the bar.
So we were like the drinking rate 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 I think
It's hard to say where a center of gravity is. Packers have conventions that they go to now.
What are the most interesting to you?
DE CON kinda got a little
out of control. I think it's a little too big.
And then we did ShmooCon for twenty years. This is the last year though, so that one's over.
But you could still go to Germany.
For CCC.
That would probably be the best thing to do in the US.
Tour con if you Oh yeah, don't take any computers to these things. But
You know, go naked and you'll be fine. Naked and afraid. There you go. C C edition.
Let me
Just pull on this geographic thread a little bit.
And then we're gonna
Sure. Move to other things, but this is from another of our mutual friends.
So
Questions around geopolitics from a tech angle, in other words, who is leading and what.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Oh my god.
It's a promising start.
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 were.
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 kinda see it if you're gonna say geopolitically
On technology in general.
China and the US are definitely trying to play.
Yeah.
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.
What are the main technologies? I mean, semiconductors and AI 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 end up
If you haven't got one in your pocket by now, you will. I mean it's just
They go everywhere.
So computers are 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.
Yeah.
There's a whole stack.
Software relies on the chips which rely
Increasingly on
Energy.
All these hyper scalers have woken up this year to the fact that
A chip from NVIDIA needs a shit ton of energy.
And
We've been burning gas to get it. So
Maybe we should find something better. So now there's a lot of intention on
Improving energy. I'm so excited about that.
Do you think the hyperscalers were will actually help
Resurrect.
Nuclear energy in the U. I think hyper scalers are gonna save us.
Yeah. It's a crazy thing to say. It's a crazy thing to say, but you can think
Meta and Microsoft and Google
And the reason is
That
We don't make enough energy.
on this planet.
Now you could say we make enough energy for Americans because
We're not very price sensitive and we can just keep throwing money at it.
But you will watch
Even not counting AI.
You will see that
Energy demand is
off the charts. 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 for next year. 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.
Well,
Yeah, I mean
I would say the
oil industry probably staffed Congress.
For most of our lives.
Now
It's hyper scalers.
And so
We are getting
the legislation that we need. You know, last year the most
bipartisan bill I know of was called Advanced that was to build nuclear reactors in the US.
No.
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 there were usually uh
anti nuclear activist group.
We invented one of the most advanced
nuclear reactors uh
The intellectual ventures lab where I was before.
And for the last eighteen 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 is all changed now.
And as of this year
This is crazy. As of this week.
So we have
Now a nuclear reactor company.
I should describe.
Which has invented a reactor.
That fits in a borehole.
They bury it a mile deep.
So this reactor is
Unquestionable. 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 ten 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.
And when you retire it or when it stops functioning you just bury it.
Yeah.
Leave the uranium where we found it. Like it's a really exciting
way of making writers.
There's a water in the borehole.
Yeah.
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 a enough pressure
To cool the reactor.
Gravity's been pretty reliable, so pretty reliable so far. 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 corps at a national lab over a couple years.
Then build a commercial reactor in like twenty twenty nine.
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.
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 gonna get the number right, but looking at China, they have how many
I think they have reactors.
About a hundred and thirty reactor projects and they tend to get them done.
On time, on budget.
There's different technologies there trying'em all.
It takes them about three years to build a reactor and those are big ones. They're
Smoking it. It's amazing. Is that
Yeah.
Maybe it's cleaned up, but mostly legacy technology in terms of reactor technologies and I won't
weigh in on that because I think we need a thousand silver bullets and I kinda want them all to succeed.
Obviously I invest in the ones I think are the best.
But
The
Future of reactors.
involves a bunch of advanced reactor technologies.
So like the terra power 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. That's a regulatory hurdle.
J'ai
U S has never figured out how to
approve any advanced reactor technology.
Once they do.
We could build something like that. That reactor is powered by nuclear waste.
It literally recycles nuclear waste inside the reactor.
So that's where we wanna go. That might take a while.
So the deep vision 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.

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I
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.
Yeah. To remain globally
strategically
Advantaged.
Yeah.
Uh or at least not lose.
Yeah.
Some of those pieces of advice that you would give.
Number one thing is gonna 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
Squatch 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.
I uh
Maybe, yeah.
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. Mm-hmm. It just makes me so happy because I feel like
That's your mantra. Right. Like 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 eighty twenty 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. Yeah.
It's like yeah, you can try to fix these eighteen separate issues.
But if your lead domino is solving for energy
Yeah.
Then
those either become irrelevant or they become a lot easier to solve.
The great
You know, example to me was how
Like recycling played out.
In the US.
Yeah, we've been recycling our whole lives.
Right now.
It's kind of a wash. You'd probably
Burn less gas, making fresh plastic.
Then if you
try to recycle these plastic bottles and things. And we're fifty years into that.
And so
It's just putting the cart before the horse. Recycling's gonna 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 gonna pick up the trash and the recycling and throw'em in the same truck.
It's not working.
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 gotta pick something that's gonna 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.
You know, if you wanna go do carbon captured

CO two molecules.
Four hundred parts per million.
Four hundred needles in a haystack with a million pieces of straw.
That's what we're talking about. So
Good luck.
I think you wanna
Find a less entropic source of carbon. Like leave the coal on the ground if that's what you want to do.
It's very highly concentrated there.
So
If you had energy that was cheap and
Basically free.
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.
And
Tell me if I'm off base here, but I I don't want people to misconstrue what you're saying.
Yeah.
It seems like what you're saying, if I'm understanding it correctly, is
Watch like
People sometimes say it's the economy stupid, like it's the energy stupid. Yeah, 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.
I mean maybe they should stop some of them are working. Yeah. Like in Copenhagen and one day.
There are issues with a larger volume of plastics besides the energy equation, I guess. But I don't know how you think it's again, something 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. Yeah.
Not where it doesn't belong. So yeah, keep it out of your testicles and keep it out of the ocean and keep it out of the places where you don't want it.
But
There are places where it can be very, very helpful.
The inventions that you describe
In your book.
are really compelling, right? And as I believe you described them, please fact check me if I'm getting this off, but
That with
Deep.
tech and you should probably
Define what that means. Sure.
The risk isn't
so much it doesn't seem to be market risk or a need risk, right? Like people could
Read about the description and say, of course we should use that.
There's technical risk up front. Yeah.
But
I'm wondering how you think about an assess as an investor.
regulatory risk. And
All of the red tape and bramble bushes.
Yeah. That entail getting something like that to
Launcher adoption.
You have built
Well.
indirectly funded people who have built
Yeah. Much better mouse traps. Right. Like quite a lot.
And been involved with
Nathan Brevult's lab and
Building technology for say
reducing the likelihood or severity of hurricanes.
Simple tech, which we could get into. Right. It's like
Why the hell isn't it being used? Yeah.
Okay. So there's a few things there.
I usually
Yeah.
involved when
I see a technology
That I think is
Ten 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
One percent better.
Which is awesome.
But I want the guy who's figuring out how to make
Whatever comes after Inkjet.
So
Two times better.
There's probably not enough margin there to
Ensure that you
Can go the distance.
But ten times better.
That's a real window. You know, it's ten times cheaper, ten times faster, ten times more efficient, ten times
On any metric.
Could be
A good window. So
That's kinda where I
See deep tech breakthroughs.
As
becoming sort of contenders.
Then we try to invest in them and help get'em 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
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 gonna take on nuclear reactors.
You can't take a nuclear reactor
And
go knocking on doors in Silicon Valley and expect
To get
Uh 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 ten X multiplier.
And some
Hundred year old industry.
Where
Nobody in Silicon Valley has touched it. Mm-hmm.
That to me that's where the action is.
I think I can prove that.
Does it need to involve hardware?
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 gonna do anyway. Yeah.
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 need along what's possible.
New chip architectures I do.
But anyway, the point is
Let's talk get back to hardware in a minute.
Yep.
When you're investing, you're looking at risk.
As you described.
So
All of Silicon Valley you could say.
is fixated on market risk.
So we have milestones like
MVP, product market fit, those kinds of things.'Cause that's a way to
Reduce market risk. Yep.
Technical risk?
You never heard of it.
If I can draw an iPhone app on a napkin, except.
Biotech investment. Okay, that's different. Yeah. We'll we'll leave Boston out of this. Yeah. But for software investment. Yeah.
There's really not technical risk that much these days.
On Canva, then we can make it. Okay. So
What I'm doing is the opposite.
I take a lot of technical risk.
Can we build this nuclear reactor? Can we put solar panels in space? Can we do whatever
But the day that
I get through that. The day we get through that.
The day the first reactor goes in the ground and lights up, there's no more technical risk.
It works, you can see it.
And there was never any market risk'cause I just have vast industrial 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
Ten billion dollars, 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 two trillion dollars a year.
The global GDP
is over a hundred trillion dollars a year.
So Silicon Valley
is doing two percent.
Of what humans rely on.
That other ninety eight percent is my Tim.
Is topline revenue and
It's I mean you could nitpick over the details.
If it's unfair, 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.
Ninety eight percent.
If you fact check me, I'm gonna win. Okay.
Ninety eight percent
Of what's left is
That's energy.
But it's
Shipping. Shipping is a two trillion dollar industry, as big as software.
We could talk about that.
Durable goods. And by shipping you mean mostly ocean based.
Mm-hmm. Right.
Durable goods, all your
Sinks and bicycles and light fixtures and chairs, that's
Four trillion dollars a year.
Automotive is another four, five, six trillion.
Yeah, 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.
What about the regulatory?
implementation piece because for instance I was reading the book
And I'm fascinated by
Containers and how the standardizing of containers.
Revolutionized
Yeah.
Activity on the planet. Yeah.
And
learning through your book about the different types of fuel and just
The congestion at ports caused by
Extraordinarily large
Si

Container ships, cargo ships.
Which is a necessity to reduce drag because they're optimizing for fuel.
Right.
The alternative that you propose
Seems like a no brainer.
Right. But then they're like, Well wait a second. Is it like the
Green
Chinese cartels so to speak, like are the sort of uh So you've named two more kinds of risk. Yeah. So Yeah, I mean what are we talking about? So just 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.
One documented pedestrian ever. Are we talking about J C is that it and uh and so you know
Other than that
It's probably gonna work, you know, not very questionable at this point.
The other
Important advancement is it's sailing.
So
It doesn't need a crew, but it doesn't need fuel.
Those two trillion dollars spent
In the shipping industry every year.
Are spent
Five out of six of those dollars is burned.
You said sailing, what if there's no wind?
If there's no wind we have electric
Back up to get out of the dead zone.
But we're actually really good at
weather prediction'cause 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 gotta
ship full of bananas and they're stuck in a dead zone. So we have
electric back up to get out of the dead zone.
And then they sell themselves.
Why aren't these things everywhere?
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. Instead they ended up suing Uber everywhere they launched.
Any shipping company in the world could make this ship.
None of them will.
So that's what we have to do. That's what the tech industry needs to do. That's why deep tech matters. That's why I want
your fans who are listening
Once they graduate from software.
Come help us build this ship.
You know, help us take on uh you don't need to be a
Physicist. I got physicists. What I need is
entrepreneurs who want to build these industries. And when you look at what happened with
Uber.
That playbook
Is incredible what happens the day my first chip sails.
Do we sell this to Mersk?
That would be like Uber selling to yellow cab. No.
We build the next Marisk.
That's the opportunity.
Would you have rather built Uber or Mersk?
So

Might. No.
Risk of assassination is high, I grant that.
Maybe higher than even in taxis.
because there are, you know, a few big cabals globally that run the shipping industry. You might need to partner with one of them.
But
That's a tomorrow problem. The truth is we can m do this. Pablos one day I'm gonna ask you for a favor. Yeah. Might need one myself. So after this error. So the point is
You could identify, you know, I don't know, risk of assassination is a fourth kind of risk, 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 wobbleys having shootouts with the
Sheriff's Office. I mean, this is crazy stuff in the history of labor. So you know, you gotta 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 it?
Improved drag.
When you double the size of a ship, your drag only goes up by fifty percent.
So
You're incentivized to build a biggest ship you can.
Well those ships
Or clogging up ports.
So if we look at what's happening in shipping
Your happy meal toys start out in China.
It takes fifty days to get them
To Los Angeles.
Only fourteen 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 fourteen days
Is a little slower.
When you're sailing thirty percent slower.
But overall it's faster. But we can make smaller ships and lots of them.
I mean I guess you ha 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.
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.
Yeah. Sell your happy meal toys to Islands.
Is Pablos a common name in Alaska?
Pablos is a totally fake name. Yeah.
All hackers have fake names.
Is the last name fake, too?
My uh
I'm not trying to fly below the radar at this point.
I got that username on a mainframe when I was like twelve and I don't even remember how. So I've been called Pablo's for
For longer than anyone can remember.
And I have to ask, I know we're
Taking a left turn here, but
On the cover of your book, you have your glasses. In every video I've ever seen, I see you in the glasses. What is the story behind the glasses?
So I've been wearing the same glasses for like twenty years, which is kind of why
They end up
on the cover of the book and people associate
Me with the glasses.
These are the best glasses ever made.
Which is why I started wearing them and'cause I'm in labs all the time. I kinda need
Safety glasses that wrap around. Yeah. Okay.
I've been wearing glasses since I was four, but
I start wearing these.
They're made of titanium alloy.
What are they? Are they Oakley? 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 ever they wanted. And they built this factory in like Nevada
To make titanium frames.
But this is
intensive to do four hundred and twenty five thousand watts to make one pair of frame.
And they have all these volatile gases in the casting process.
And so eventually the factory blew up.
And nobody will ever make glasses this way again?
But I've been wearing the same ones for twenty years. You can't break them. Oh, I have a few pairs that I cycle out'cause
the nose bridge gets loose and I got a guy who will tighten them up.
Yeah. So 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.
Are you optimistic? Would you describe yourself as optimistic?
Well
People cast me that way and I I think it's probably fair.
But
What I wrote in the book about that is that
I think
I'm not a Pollyanish optimist, like I don't think everything's gonna be awesome.
What I think is
The future could be awesome.
That we have
Some volition in this.
That we build that future.

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 wanna aim for, what future we wanna build, and do that. So I call it possibilist.
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.
Let's talk about
B word for a second, billionaires. So I
No of at least three.
You don't need to name names, although you you mention a few uh publicly.
To
Just find you to be the shiniest, most attractive
Higher.
And
I wanna know
Why you think that is. Because
They're not looking for script kitties in Romania.
Right, there are a lot of people who can steal passwords.
And who are capable hackers of various types.
Yeah.
But you just seem to pop up again aga and again.
On these teams.
Why is that?
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're gett 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.
'Cause I worked on things that were like way too soon or way too cool or way too expensive.
I'm not gonna 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 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. Not my words, by the way. It's one of our mutual friends'
Shiny meaning attractive, by the way. Not just like uh
Crow collecting buttons or something, I'm just saying.
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 that 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.
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. Yeah. But when I think Nathan Merville, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. Yeah.
All Seattle, right? So is there some
Engineered serendipity.
Placing or is that less of a factor?
Silicon Valley before that.
And
I would say
The main reason I left is that
Sock puppet attack.
What it's like.
In two thousand one
Everything in Silicon Valley got shut down because of the dot com bubble.
And so
It was a wasteland.
I mean it w it was this mean it was the U because the hoster child for dot com bubble was
Pets.com.
And they had this ad campaign they spent like a billion dollars on ads, like Super Bowl ads, with a sock puppet and it was just the most ridiculous thing. It's you're like the end is nigh.
The end was not, 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 overindexed 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 we work.
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 the We Work founder is a controversial Okay, whatever choice. No, no, I'm I'm I'll take the Uber founder. Any good any founder controversial otherwise the two strong ones. Okay, fine. But good entrepreneurs. No tech.
So let's arm those guys with some actual technology. That's what
I think but that's not your question. The point is
In two thousand one, 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
for the price of rent in San Francisco. I could rent like a whole neighborhood and I was like, Oh try that.
How did you choose Seattle over every other place? 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 thinking, Oh, this could be okay.
And then I got an email.
From Neil Stevenson.
I was gonna bring him up, so I'm glad you did. Yeah.
Deal.
If you're any kind of nerd.
Neil is a demigod. Yeah. So Snow Crash.
Metaverse.
Yeah.
I mean when did Cryptonomicon come out, which I love.
Okay. So s early working on cryptocurrency in it.
Yeah. When Cryptodomicon came out. So
I'm a closet Neil Stevenson fan.
And so I got an email from Neil and he's like, Hey
How did he find you?
Mutual friends. Okay.
Jeremy Bornstein introduced us and he was the founder of the company I'd been working for doing AI stuff.
That got shut down.
In Dotcom Bubble.
Sog 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
Oh
an envelope factory and turned it into like a machine shop.
They like
Bought a machine shop on
Surplus.
And actually the crusty old machine is kinda came with it.
So they were trying to build
What was called Blue Operations, and it was
And I went down there and Okay, we're trying to go to space and 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 you know, a couple other
machinists and some other super nerds and
tried all these experiments and
That was the origin of Blue Origin.
Wow.
What were the alternatives that you guys were exploring?
So
Rockets are like ninety percent fuel.
So when you light up a rocket, you're just burning fuel to get out of
Earth's gravity wall.
Cargo ship plus. Yeah, right. Totally. So
Can't make rocket sale, but
We thought maybe you could. So what if you could just take the
Payload, the craft, the part you want.
Yeah.
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
Yeah, Jeff Bezos was
The one who started Blue Origin.
He's the one funding it.
And
In those days, Jeff was worth like seven billion dollars.
And our job was to figure out what we could do with like one.
That's a ballsy bet.
So yeah, so pretty well since.
He's done all right, and now it's like putting a billion or more every year in Blue Origin, but
The point is
We could get further faster by standing on the shoulders of NASA and Russia.
than starting in a fifty billion dollar hole, inventing some new
Propulsion scheme.
So we had a bunch of ideas that were really cool.
And this again started in two thousand one.
I'm gonna go to Blue Origin next week for the
twenty fifth 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'em.
Sounds safe.
It's totally not safe. This is before you could buy a quadcopter at
Yeah, Walmart.

code to do f 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.
And
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.
This is gonna be
out of left field, but I like
out of left field.
You know what? I don't want to leave this question of
why you get hired for these projects too quickly.
Sure.
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?
Honestly, I think there's probably somebody better at everything than me.
You're very multidisciplinary. 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.
'cause I'm kind of a generalist, so I
Don't write.
much code. I mean I'm fucking vibe coding for fun, but like no one cares about any code I'm writing. I'm not that guy.
But I 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 well.
An M dash shape. M dash per yeah, M dash. M M dash for millennial. I like that.
So I think that
My suspension of disbelief, my willingness, also I think one of the other
Things that
Works to my advantage is
Most of my
Colleagues and friends are legitimate.
scientists or engineers and they're formally trained and they know what they're doing.
Those folks.
get stuck with kind of some professional liability.
If you're a scientist
You can't say
Crazy shit because
That could be
Professionally damaging. For sure.
I'm a hacker.
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 had to understand
What does Delta V mean? And I'm like
Googling that shit on the side.
So
I had to learn those things on the job. And I'm
more fluent now, but I'm not formally trained in those things. But uh it's okay for me to ask a dumb question about rockets.
And so I think that helps me a lot.
It's my job to ask dumb questions. Yeah, and you get away with it too. Yeah.
So that's that's really cool. And you're doing such a good job of that'cause 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'cause they can't ask those dumb questions. Ask me some dumb questions. We'll prove it right now.
Okay.
Zero effect.
Oh man. What is zero effect?
You and Alonley are both fans of Zero Effect.
Okay. And I've never seen it. What is zero effect?
I thought I got this from him, but he says
You got it from me.
This is a
Like a philosophy that drives me.
Okay. So there was a film called The Zero Effect. It was like Ben Stiller made it twenty years ago or something. Nineteen ninety eight. Okay.
The main character is the world's greatest private detective.
And at one point in the film he's articulating his
philosophy of being the world's greatest private sector.
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, which is that
Like the fantasy of every millennial on screens right now. Yeah, right. Well here's how to do it, guys.
If you lose your keys.
And you go looking for them.
Of all of the things in the entire world, you're only looking for one of them.
And your odds of finding it are very low.
But
If you go looking for something
In general.
And you don't set such a specific target.
You're bound to find something.
And so
It's a way of thinking about
Like
Oh yeah, if I'm open
If I'm open to what's possible. So for example, why I say that's a philosophy that matters to me, I'm running 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 it 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, so I do. Well, or at least a lot of them.
So you know.
If one of'em works.
I'll have it. So that's kind of the game. And I think more people would get something out of
That approach to life then
The opposite, which is much more common.
Which is
No people are trying so hard to
Be so sure and be right all the time and
And they really aren't anyway.
There's 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 nineties.
Was
The way everybody was like that.
You know, you could just
Walk down the street, find a homeless dude.
Start telling them 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.
Is the movie.
Worth watching or is is it really just the philosophy? Oh, totally good movie.
It's a good movie. It's awesome. Go watch it.
I mean I don't even watch movies, but
Trust me, this one's good.
And War Games. Those are the two movies in the world to watch. Everything else you can do.
Defensible movie on hacking. 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 and
I explain everything, I show'em 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. So enhanced photo. Enhanced photo. Enhanced photo. I know enhanced ph it's such bullshit. Although enhanced photo is working pretty well now. Yeah, 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? It's not a fairy tale.
It was figured out
By a hacker named Major Malfunction.
And
England. Great handle.

And so
The remote key buttons that you have for your car.
They're kind of like R F I Ds. They have a battery in them so they can emit a signal.
And then 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, do to do manipulate the key.
So he's able to manipulate the key.

And it
Explain this to me.
And I don't know if he was drunk or what, but he probably shouldn't have.
And so on the list.
Go by the dealership.
Mm-hmm.
And
You can open any.
So
That was just a
At the time I wasn't gonna say the name of the
Brand but you did. So yeah, we I mean we can bleep it out.
Can open any car from that manufacturer.
I think they probably have fixed this by now, but you would have to
Or at least in modern cars. I sure hope so.
I'm not gonna 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 a Tesla and modern cars almost all have an internet connection and they can run system update.
Which is a very important way of
Yeah, reducing a tax 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.
Well I guess it still is if you
If you're going after vintage vehicles.
Potentially. Maybe, yeah. I I'm not I'm not gonna tell you how to do it. Yeah, yeah, no.
Yeah. All right.
I'd be curious to know and there's another friend who popped up in
Your book, Chris Young.
So yeah 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. Oh yeah, good. 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 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.
He's really into like Victorian era exercises, right? Yeah, right. No, you you got all the all the club bells and and for a while was training with a uh
Sherlock Holmes esque Kane. I forgot what's that 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
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.
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.
Yeah.
even before he created his empire, yeah, with longer time horizons than anyone else. Yeah. Just changing
The
Time frame.
Yeah.
Of thinking and planning.
What else have you gleaned from the Well that one I would I think it's a very important
One
Because
You sort of like you said, sort of flippantly
Mention billionaires.
And people get pissed off about these folks.
As soon as they're rich.
Just because the rich or successful.
But it often what I see is it's blinding them
It's blinding people.
To learning what is it that made those people successful? What is it that's good, what is it that's replicable, what are the lessons, and that's why I think
You know, we kinda need you to pay attention then because
For better or worse, more people will probably listen to you than these billionaires.
And so you can save us get those lessons. Yeah. So for example
What I learned working for Jeff that
really made a big difference to me personally.
Was that
If you think about Blue Origin, what is really going on there?
It's not a way for Jeff to get rich.
That's covered.
So
Why make Blue Origin? Well Blue Origin's vision
Is
To build a future.
For humans off of this planet.
turn earth into like a wildlife refuge that maybe you would visit
Once in a lifetime, you know.
'Cause this is an awesome
Amazing and beautiful place. And
We don't want to fuck it up too badly. So
That sounds crazy. None of us are gonna be around for that.
But it might take thousands of years.
To craft that future for humanity, не best case scenario.
Earth just melts into the sun.
And that's if nothing else wipes us out.
In the meantime.
So
We got a
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 plan it B.
So
That's what Blue Origin is about.
Now that's gonna 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?
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 colony's obviously not very relevant to me. I run a ten 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, where this cargo ship
And I say, All right.
A hundred years from now.
Are we gonna 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.
In a hundred 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 a hundred years.
So then
Ask yourself
Does it have to take a hundred years?
Or
Could we do it in ten?
And if you can start to craft a vision for how to do it in ten
Then you align with a lot of the machinery in the world that works.
Venture funds are all ten year funds. I can't invest in things that take twenty.
But I can invest in things that take ten.
So all the money
Is in tenure funds.
So
People's careers.
could do you know, they could sign up for a ten year project, but a twenty year project might be too much.
So that's the kind of thing
That helps me
Craft.
a vision for what I could
Invest him.
Like okay.
Ships, yeah, we could do that in ten years.
The nuclear reactor? Totally we can do it in ten years. We're gonna do it by July.
So
All these crazy sounding things that we do, I looked at them as

Definitely will get done in a hundred.
But we're gonna try and do it in ten.
And I think that
I learned that from Jeff.
You know, and you look at what
You know.
Even Amazon is doing.
They're taking on a whole bunch of
Projects that they could
prove a success in less than ten 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 or ten years or less.
And in ten years
You could do a lot.
I think people don't realize
Google, Apple, Microsoft
All companies that
were successful in less than ten years.
But not just that.
The Apollo program.
was less than ten years. The space shuttle program.
The Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal.
Empire stabling was like
eighteen or twenty four months or something insane. Right. So what are we sitting on our thumb for?
Making more
You know.
My friend.
Gave me that number when his remodel in Santa Monica took five years.
He said, Come on, guys.
What is happening. 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 ten years, everything.
Do you think that
Elon actually wants to colonize Mars or is that a
Clever.
Visual
And story to tell to Marshall.
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.
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 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
Yeah.
good of a destination. So well I remember somebody said to me, they're like, if you think you want to live on Mars, go spend a month in the winter
In Antarctica.
Which I have done for my entire childhood.
So you know, Mars does exactly appeal to me.
I've had enough of that. I wanna 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.
Yeah, I mean he's a phenomenon. It's phenomenal. And we need to
Look, if you don't like Elon, fine.
Go show us how to do it better.
You don't need to like everything about someone. Yeah.
That's true. Or admire everything about someone in order to
recognize and potentially model
Some of the things that really do work. 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 you two was doing it.
And the idea behind the one campaign'cause they wanted to solve
malaria. They want to solve H I V
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 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
Автократ 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'm I want them for what they're good for and what we can work on together. So yeah, I I'm w 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.
Or about but
We need like a thousand Elon.
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.
S
This is uh
This is from a
New York Times article from two thousand eighteen. So man. 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.
Oh I don't even know if it still exists, but what was it like to attend that?
Oh yeah. So 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 organized 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 or
Siloed'cause 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 who's worked in all four of those things.
Everybody else is usually like a
Nobel Prize winner and something.
But it's otherwise like a
normal conference we come
Hang out together for a few days.
Thankfully Amazon or Jeff is paying for it, which is great.
And we get to
Cross pollinate.
These folks who
Really
You know, often are peer less in a sense,'cause 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'em 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'cause 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.
Good time to
Explain why the hell we're sitting where we're sitting.
Well is this location. Where are we?
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 of them. It's a beautiful space. It's a beautiful space.
It's uh 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
Attracts.
more deep tech founders to these things that'cause they built this one and they built one in Detroit.
It's even bigger.
It is so cool.
And it's got space, 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.
Yeah. Yeah, this is anything but tiny. Yeah. 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 seventy seven. I'm like, where the hell is building seventy seven?
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 s
Then go out and left.
I'm like building five.
Psyup completed a mountain walking left. We're gonna come back to the Psyup.
And
Use uh the big building straight ahead as your target. Get to that and then go left. No number on it. Entrances at the far corner of the building.
Mm-hmm.
I said, Am I being a setup for a podcast kidnapping? Very elegant. Like, where the hell am I going?
He said, I'll come out and meet you with the black van.
And there was actually a black fan. And I'm like, Wow, this is just
Now you know why Elon Lee and I are friends.
Yeah, yeah. I was like, You know, this is a coin toss. I have no idea what this
Well my dating life has been very
Colorful because of uh
Every you know.
Every girl who's dating me ends up
uh meeting me at like some strange warehouse in the industrial district with you know
Wires hanging out of metal and yeah.
So I remember
Ages ago, when it when it first came out.
Someone recommended that I read
Kevin Mitnik's The Art of Deception. Yeah.
Which uh you made a face.
Oh I did shit. Yeah, well okay, tell me tell me what that's about.
Delightful human, you could say.
He's dead now, so we don't want to say anything bad about him, but
You know, hackers kinda rallied around him'cause he was one of the first hackers to get thrown in jail.
Most hackers, like I don't know.
You're a lead.
Kevin is kind of a joke.

He was a good social engineer. Well, that's why I bring it up because you mentioned Psyop.
And
As far as I could tell, ninety percent of the book was social engineering. Yeah, that's his thing. And it's worth learning. I mean, that's a totally great thing. It's different than
hacking.
Okay.
But
Syop. Was that a joke or is that something like
No, I had gone through
Building seventy seven and I'm like
Hey go into new lab and he just waved me through. I think this will be the easy challenge for you. Yeah, got it. All right. Yeah. Anyway.
I wanna 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.
Study Chinese, the whole nine yards.
Spend about
Oddly enough, right now, twenty percent of my time probably speaking Chinese, resurrecting my Chinese right now. Wow.
And
That's actually an exaggeration, but it's like
And twenty percent probably.
And I have been so
Simultaneously impressed and terrified.
By China on so many different levels. You and me both. And uh there was a book Tyler Callen recommended. Great, amazing guy. Everybody should check out.
There's a book called Breakneck.
Oh.
And I haven't yet read it, but one of my employees is reading it.
And recommend 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 uh
I have been chewing on that. I just
learned about this yesterday.
But I'm wondering what
Impresses you.
About
China'cause they really seem to have their act together. The homogeneity, relatively speaking, of the country helps.
the speed with which the CCP can execute top down.
Helps tremendously.
But
Anything else come to mind?
I could learn a lot about China from you. I've been there some, but probably not as much. I don't speak the language.
My way of learning was to start sleeping with a Chinese woman.
So I've been doing that for five years. Frankly. It's helped a ton. I really opened up my eyes to
China. So yeah, my fiance is
Chinese
But
been in America long enough that
She'll put up with me and
I think the
insight from that book. I haven't read Breakneck yet. It's a relatively new book. I
I'm also just kind of a
spectator on what's happening in China.
But you have a unique multidisciplinary technical lens.
Yeah, so what I can tell you
I think there's a couple of major factors in
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
L's is to put lawyers out of business.
So we can fix this country.
And I think that's gonna work.
So if you are a parent right now.

'Cause we're gonna 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.
I mean, I use L L Ms on a weekly basis for
Legal first passes already. For a lawsuit's good.
No for all my lawsuits. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'll give you an example. I mean, this will be no surprise to you, but
With just off the shelf basic
Chat GPT or fill in the blank for your favorite L M.
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 over development. So I wanted to create

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 like 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.
Yeah. And then it was copy and pasted right in.
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
No, if you're running a business
We build a computational model of your business now.
Not an L M, but a but still a 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 not doing this
Be terrified.
'Cause by next year your competitors will be doing this.
So
I take heart because what I think is it means
A hundred years from now.
Governments will do that too.
So if you haven't seen this, it w 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. It's unbelievable. 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.
That's right.
remarkable what they're already doing.
These are tools.
To help humans make better decisions.
No
An L L M 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 uh 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.
would be great to have like a Netflix series where like every
Episode shows
Something amazing from China.
That sucks in the US, you know. I just think that's the 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 an Al Alaskan, which is like a
Supercharged American. So look, I
Think so.
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 gotta give'em credit for the things that they're good at. Now
The thing that's missing
Here is
A respect for
that engineering mindset, a respect for like you described.
Putting the dominoes in order.
a respect for
Building thoughtfully.
Respect for basic arithmetic, a respect for
Building the future that we want.
We need to work on that.
China's problem
No respect for
Me.
For the hacker mindset.
For the renegade, for the creative person, for the crazy ones. Like they don't make room for that.
And it's hurting their ability to do new things.
Yeah.
They're kicking ass by just
Waiting for us to figure shit out and then implementing it faster and better than us.
So
We've spent most of our life worried about
China copying us.
We need to figure out how are we gonna copy China.
And I think that's
A wake up call where we're at right now.
Yeah.
Very curious to see where it all goes. Yeah.
They're moving at remarkable speed with implementation on so many fronts. And that's g it's great for humanity.
I mean it really is. I 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.
So I'm gonna 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 culture revolution in mainland China.
And uh everybody should go visit. It's just an amazing place.
Now.
It's also a tiny speck of an island.
That
Happens to be incredibly valuable for a number of different reasons.
Primarily chip production.
And
There's a lot of discussion around
what say an amphibious assault might look like.
How China might
exert pressure on Taiwan non violently, which I think is the most probable

But
On one side you have these statistics that are related to shipbuilding capacity.
And
China has I'm gonna get this little wrong. But what is it like? It's like thirty X, three hundred X.
the US capacity.
And
I believe they also require that any commercial vessel over a particular size needs to be
Manufactured or built to military spec.
Just in case they need to be
requisitioned or otherwise enrolled.
In an attack.
Now
We're not gonna catch up with that.
In the next two years.
Yeah, I mean it's it's a logistics impossibility.
But you do have a
some startups like Anderil for Inch 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?
I do think the nature of
Ballistic warfare is changing.
I think
The C Sandrill.

Fairly compelling. I think we probably need a lot more Anderls.
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'em.
What we've got are like
OnlyFans 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 are 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 of the line at Starbucks, you know.
It's just
Not even close, so I think we need to recalibrate.
On our expectation of
Вот і мінис товорк.
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 me to disparage anybody who is dealing with something like that, but
You're evolved to
Be useful to the world around you, to the people around you.
And if you can't see how your work
Is useful.
Yeah, you're gonna get depressed.
I mean I think that happens a lot. I'm not saying it's the only reason.
But
When you have a whole society that doesn't really do anything
Where you can see how anyone gives a shit about what you do.
That's not gonna be very healthy.
So I think we just need to recalibrate in our society and recognize that like okay
Everybody needs to do something that matters.
Do something where they can see how it matters.
I 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 again, I'm I don't mean to belittle anyone who's depressed. I I'm just saying as a 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'cause you can build a thing and you can see I built that thing and somebody's g 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 wanna see
Us build.
And I think Anderl is an example of like we're gonna build these things that help us, you know. I wanna build those ships.
We can build ships. Yeah, and we can build the 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 bullshit 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 shit. And I don't know why you wouldn't want to do that.
And we can build ships, we can build chips, we can build all these other things.
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 and the Delorean with the crazy hair, as I heard you say once.
Honeypot means something else to hackers, so I'll go with like lightning rod.
Ha ha.

You just look for the crazy hair and the Delorean and that's how you find them.
Yeah, I'd say I attract some of them because I've worked on some of the kinds of projects they want to do.
And hopefully.
they believe that I'll at least hang in there long enough to understand what they're trying to do and
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 it.
a technology or an invention that we might have been really helpful with, but it's too late.
Yeah.
Is frustrating.
Too late in terms of stage.
We're basically helpful at the beginning. You know, we're helpful in the early stages.
When
You gotta 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 it 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 I would love to see
These especially the breakthroughs really early.
Nerd them. Yeah, but I still need help. Yeah, I need to deputize
My friends
There's probably like V Cs hanging out at Starbucks by
M I T.
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, 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.
Robbie Mullin wasn't going to Ted when he was a teenager.
Yeah, Rodney's not going to Ted. That's that's right.
He spoke it.
A couple of Ted events, I think. Okay, but I mean when he was like
The underscore. Yeah, I know, right, yeah.
Where does salsa enter the picture? Oh my God.
Because it seems to be important to you.
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.
Um
All reverse engineering.
So when I show up

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,'cause I started twenty years ago.
But
Very
Unorthodox.
Salsa Dancer, which
To be fair to my partners, I should say that.
'Cause I don't dance like everyone else and I can't learn to dance like someone else.
I have to try the stuff and then
Converge on what works.
That's a really
Great thing, but I you know, so I dance differently than ever else. But yeah, salsa for me was very important because
Partly'cause 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 um
By all other metrics.
So I had trained in Aikido.

You know, 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'd 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 a 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 Aikido and I was trying to learn that through reverse engineering as well, which also has
Unorthodox.
Problems.
Eventually
short version of the story is I
figured out that it was an upgrade.

W sweaty old Japanese guys.
Sweaty young Latin girls. So I'm still basically doing the same thing.
As Aikido, but in salsa and I can do it any night, anywhere in the world.
There's salsa dancers, you just gotta know where to find'em. You don't need to speak the language.
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'cause I'm at the bottom always.
And I think that's good for me. And you learn something
My way of moving through the world is so heavily affected by Aikido and Salsa. So anyway, I've been doing that for a long time.
It's also has a huge advantage over Tango that you can find it anywhere.
Tango is pretty much narrow. Yeah.
Unless you're in Argentina, in which case you have an embarrassment of riches, but yeah anywhere else, even in Argentina outside of the capital, you can find more salsa.

And the reason I defected from Tango, I tried to do Tango first for like 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

So to actually implement the trial and error. Trying everything and throwing out what doesn't work for you. Yeah.
How do you even figure out
The menu of options that you need to run through from A to Z.
Well, again, you're going back to the Tim Ferris
Learning style.
I'm not trying to codify the menu.
I'm discovery mode.
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 for 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 kinda 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. Cause in Salsa you're like turning a girl into a pretzel and then untying her at like a hundred and eighty miles an hour.
Once I realized, okay, I know how to get out of every possible thing that I can get into every failure mode I know how to get out 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.
We may have more overlap.
Then you realize. Yeah. Uh just in the sense that
I had when I first got to Argentina
In two thousand five.
For late two thousand four.
Maybe early two thousand four.
I had zero interest in tango.
Absolutely zero. I I in fact.
Wanted to avoid it.
Because my reference points were
Scent of a woman.
True lies.
flour in the teeth. I'm like, who would ever want to do that? It looks so stiff.
Right.
I did not have any interest in the choreography.
My only dance background at that point was that I'd started
co founded a the first hip hop dance troop at Princeton University. Wow. And so break dancing. All right. That's all I had, which was improvised. Yeah. Okay, cool. 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. Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.
the improv jazz aspect of needing to be not just fast on your feet, but like mentally
fast enough to improvise in that way. And
Then
I was walking down.
I've been in the 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 m hu 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 rap.
Just had
All of this cold air. I could see it just billowing out the A C. And so I walked in there.
It was just killing time and this
older women, like middle aged woman, chain smoking.
Bleach blonde hair.
In Spanish was like
Hey asshole. She's like, I know you're not gonna buy anything.
But if you're gonna stick around, you have to at least
Give me ten pesos for the class upstairs. And I was like
Uh okay. What's the class? Tango. I was like, oh
Okay, fine. And meanwhile
For the first month or so there.
A half Panamanian half Argentine friend had convinced me
To go to Argentina from Panama.
Because he had said
that Argentina has the best red wine in the world, the best steak in the world, the most beautiful women in the world, and you can live there
For a king on pennies. And I was like
Sold. Let's go.
So I found the steak, I found the wine.
It was cheap and I was like, Where are all these beautiful women?
And then I walked upstairs to this class, it was like three PM or something.
And it was like nine smoking hot women and one bored looking guy who was like a husband who'd 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. Yeah. Now this is interesting. Yeah. 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 uh when I first tried to go out into the wild. I still do. Oh my god.
Yeah. It's such a good story. It's a good, very humbling experience. For me 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 Aikido Ka are trying to do.
And they're better at it.
Yeah.
And so I went to try to learn from them and then Yeah, it is
For people who haven't really been exposed to dance.
At the very least you should go to
A tango or salsa dance hall?
Yeah. To see good dancers who are
Strangers. Yeah.
dance with one another because
If I took you to La Viruta or Niño Bien or one of these Milonga and
Argentina. Mm-hmm.
During kind of prime time.
Which would be like two AM or three AM. Yep.
I don't know how they get out. Dancers don't show up till they show up really late. I never go out till midnight. And
I could show you a pair dancing and you would say wow.
They've must
have been practicing and rehearsing this choreography for six months and I'd say, No, this is the first time they're dancing. There you go.
There you go. 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. Yeah.
I can do that. I'll do that to Salsa dancer. Salsa is super fast.
Yeah.
So this is a lot. Well
Tango can get fast, but Salsa is like dependably fast. Yeah.
So I go.
Very
Fast music.
The steps are fast and there's a lot of spinning and shit. And so
I'll close them 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

And so
You can sometimes
Especially
For some dancer, especially if they're uptight because like uh
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'em out of that mindset. So I can get her eyes closed and I can it even and you won't know.
She can spin
And I remember also one of the
aspects of my tango immersion'cause I went
A hundred and ten percent. I just fully committed. I mean my feet
ended up
I was doing
Three to six hours a day. Yeah.
And my feet ended up so bruised because the shoes are these really thin shoes, they're basically suede slippers. Yeah.
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. There'd be one I remember.
Labiruta, I think it's in the basement of like the Armenian consulate. Yeah.
Filled with smoke.
Which I can actually tolerate in that environment. Everyone's sweating.
Yeah. And it's got kind of uh
A an illegal speakeasy type of feel. Yep. Definitely a fire hazard. Totally.
Then there's another one, Sundarland, which
was basically in a
High school
Gymnasium on a basketball court?
Just blindingly bright lights. Okay. And a totally different
Crowd.
And
Buy crowd.
I mean
Almost every age you can imagine. I mean it's like eighteen plus, but you would have
older ladies, you would have seventy 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.
What was your violation? Well my violation was very
Basic. It is a 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 like 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.
Uh 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.
Yeah. So I would get screamed off by the men because I
Bump into them.
And
Argentines are are
They're very much
Like
At least in the capital city.
Very much like Italians. Like they they are passionate.
Mm-hmm gang of folks.
Very wild gesticulating.
Very high volume. Yeah. And
If you bump into their lady, they're they're gonna 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
Yeah.
Especially if in my case that woman is a really good dancer. Yeah. 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. Totally. 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 in disgust in the middle of a song, which is
Quite a show.
in the Tanger 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. Yeah. How you're trying to move me. Yeah. And they would just get furious.
Yeah.
Then I would put my tail between my legs and like scuttle off and recover.
That's why I say it's important to do. It's humbling
Even now, I mean I've been dancing for twenty years.
But if I show up
You know?
They'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. New York City, yeah. I live
In the epicenter.
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 also seemed to be.
The Tango world also has its factions.
Since every subculture needs its infighting.
Yeah, exactly. So there's definitely a fair amount of that. And
You know, I brought up the the older guys, like the seven year old guys.
In part because I remember going to these dance halls.
And
Yeah, 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,'cause 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. Oh yeah.
And the reason for that is that you get these young bucks or
Thirty or whatever.
Professional stage dancers, they want to show off every tool in the toolkit.
Right. And it ends up just being a melee.
Yeah. 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. Yes, the musicality, exactly is what matters. Yeah. And salmon salsa and
Yeah.
It's derivatives.
Yeah.
So now, twenty years in
Why you started
salsa it seems in part to get away from like the
homogeneity of the hacker world, but you're still doing it.
Yeah.
I do it less. I want to Covid kinda damaged the salsa scene. It's mostly back, but I don't have a salsa community anymore.
The problem with that is
It takes me a while to sort of
Brainwash my partners into doing the thing I wanna do.
You gotta find a certain special kind of partner that can hang in there for that.
What I do'cause I travel so much and I dance salsa everywhere I go
It's kinda 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. Yeah.
Paulos, we covered a lot of ground.
We could of course cover a million other things. I get it.
For another five hours, but
Is there anything that we haven't touched on
That
You would like to bring up.
Oh wow. Anything at all. I have a few closing questions as well, but I'm just wondering if anything comes to mind.
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.
Is I got early start.
And then maybe by two thousand one or something I was able to sort of
Say okay, did all the 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 ten or twenty years into their career now.
And so maybe uh 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 a opportunity here to see technology as
A force for good to make the world better.
We build this toolkit that we're gonna 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

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,'cause 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.
That is a military helicopter that just flew over us. Oh yeah, you're
Trained in military helicopters.
Great, we can rewind. Yeah, no no I'm good, I'm good. I just wanted to make
Say this is this is a lively environment. I like it.
Those people.
Yeah.
Let's say there are
least a handful listening who resonate with what you just said. Yeah.
What should they do? Should they fill out a form on your website? Should they
Check it.
out anything online related to you, send you an email. I mean what would you want those people to be careful I ask for. I Yeah, I'd be careful to email, but Yeah, I don't know. I mean look, I try to read every email I already I can't reply to all of them. So
I don't know the right answer, with or without me, I think these are
Important things to do.
We can take on
Some fraction of of things and help out a little bit.
I think that what I'm trying to do is convince not just those founders.
But also those investors.
Like hey.
You could
Steer.
What you're doing.
to bigger opportunities. Look at deep tech, 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
Usu spectrum.
I've made that.
shift largely in my own investing in the last five years. Wow, cool.
Oh yeah.
I know
We can cut this out, but you're an investor in holobiome.
Yeah. Yeah, that's one that we did. Super cool. Bola biome is amazing. It is. I mean, I think that's gonna be such hopefully, you know, fingers crossed, yeah, we can talk about it. A service to humanity. I mean, building a proper library.
Yes.
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 of thousands. Yeah, 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.
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, the mechanism to do that.
And it's exciting because they're figuring out cool stuff already. Super cool company.
Yeah, I've been I've been getting very involved with
You know, aquaculture and
Like algae feed additives for cows to reduce
Methane production.
Which is frankly very far outside of my comfort zone. Like I okay, I hope to have a
Positive return on investment.
But
I tend to get myself
Sometimes.
Into trouble.
For instance
I invested in a company that was developing inhalable insulin.
So insulin that you could
Well, 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.
Right and a company very clear if it's certainly in Uber or a Blue Bottle Coffee or
Fill in the blank.
But
Yeah, I think that's a great thing.
As an intrepid

Because it a lot of it just seems more meaningful. If it works. Right. So the trick there
You know most
I'm sure you know by now.

investors would do is get a portfolio
try to get a big enough portfolio to offset those failures with hits.
And
That's the 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 know.
And we're gonna hope to get a couple of hits.
Over the course of a single tenure fund. In one fund we'll do about sixty
So we'll do a another fund
And we'll do another sixty 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 seeds. So Yeah.
If you could only place one bet in Fusion, where would you place it?
Oh boy.
Don't get me started.
Yeah.
Okay, I'm started.
Yeah. Okay. Fusion.
Or would your entry zero?
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 and 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 together.
Is
Temperatures that rival the sun. This'cause 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's so hot it melt 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.
That's why people make fun of Fusion all the time and say that
twenty years away and always will be.
That changed.
So the cool thing is
A few years ago.
The team from MIT called Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Now
published a series of I think seven papers that explain exactly how they can make
Magnetic confinement fusion work. And the real breakthrough was a new superconductor.
It's a superconductor that allows them to make
The world's most powerful magnet.
Which they have done.
And it's
Awesome.
Crazy cool magnet. But
Now they got that working.
We're out of the science risk window.
Into the technical risk window, which means
Can they engineer a fusion reactor?
So
I'd say commonwealth is
Probably the
Most well funded, most advanced.
plasma fusion reactor company. They're building what's called a Togamack, 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 then they're gonna need tritium and there's about enough tritium on earth left to make
They go one time.
Mm.
And the only way to make more tritium is
You guessed it in a fusion reactor.
Where they've got to get like
Ninety nine percent efficiency on getting the tritium out. No we don't know if that's gonna be possible. So there's like just a zillion of these
Really hard engineering problem. So anyway, that's a watch. 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 sights is there's very little of it left.
And in your old Swiss watches and things.
That's why they glow you need treatment. 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.
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'll have to fill once and it runs the rest of your life.
Q greater than one.
Q greater than one is the metric.
Has anyone has ever actually achieved that.
If you count the entire
Energy for the system.
There are projects in once in a while you see fusion headlines where it's like
Yeah, fusion works.
And what they've done is
on system level one, which basically means the energy going into the fusion from like the hundred and ninety two 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 it 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.
'Cause they're trying to attract that capital. And I think they're being a little disingenuous about it. I'm not gonna name names.
And the problem with that is it poisons the well.
For the people who do have something that could work. So you gotta be very careful about whether you think it's gonna map to that ten year venture time horizon.
I have seen
A lot of the fusion companies
I haven't evaluated all of them. I've not invested in any of the plasma fusion companies.
I will tell you because I am a crazy
Venture capitalist who invests in wild ideas.
I did invest in one.
And it's called nanoconfinement fusion.
So these guys
Figure out a very simple way.
To cause fusion.
By putting deuterium.
Together with
Carbon nanotubes.
Yeah.
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 w using metal lattices. So
This is a very fringe area infusion. Probably any physicist you know will tell you.
That Pablos 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. So there's a
Important inflection point there were
We were able to see this works in the lab.
Can we commercialise it as well?
Completely insane, and you have some degree of technical due diligence.
given the way you're investing, right? If you're 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.
Then it's like
Okay. Yeah, so I'm along for that ride. I'm gonna get it wrong sometimes.
But if that works, the upside is
Fucking Utopia. So
We're gonna do a few of those. And we have a few.
Which I'm not gonna 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
Field
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.
Yeah, I think the heart of what you're getting at
One thing worth
Articulating here is
Like 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.
'Cause 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 gonna come later.
It's interesting because you have the opposite problem of a lot of venture capital. That's right. I do. Right. And I know that you're not looking for technical co founders.
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
'Cause 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.
I mean the other issue is that if you have someone who's very technical, let's say that they happen to be a unicorn and they're also really good at business, yeah, if they try to spearhead both sides of that coin, they're gonna burn out.
Totally.
I think we have a fucked up mythology in Silicon Valley.
We imagine
This amazing
smart person who invented something and then
became a patent lawyer and patented it, wrote the code to launch the first version, and then
Higher 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.
the 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 gotta find the people who are good at the 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.
The host probably does.
I believe in
Do the thing you're good at.
hire friends or people who are good at the things you suck at. So
What I don't know how to do
is scale up on
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 wanna figure out how do I get them to party with the entrepreneurs and and team up and
I don't know how to scale that, but I really want to.
Pablos, where should people find you online? What are the best
Websites or otherwise.
I have a
Deep
Future dot 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 uh s record some of them.
And then
I'm on all the stuff like
You know, I'm Pablo's on
Ex 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'cause the only things I send out are
Super inspiring and amazing technology. So join that or they can find that at the
Deep future. Yeah. That's their
There's a WhatsApp group with
Propaganda.
Enjoying that too.
And if people are interested in the book, which I have in my backpack right now, it's Deep Future Creating Technology That Matters.
A lot of good stories.
And a lot of head spinning
Statistics. Oh no, don't say that. Well, I shouldn't say statistics. That makes it sound too sterile. Yeah.
But just facts and figures that
Underscore a lot of important points that
Or
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 and so on. I mean it's really remarkable.
The statistics are you know, those are meant to be uh
Drop kicks.
Well Pablo
Thank you for taking the time. So great to hang. No, this is awesome. I'm glad we finally got to do it. Yeah, super fun. After all these years and yeah, I came unarmed so I wouldn't
Intimidate your uh sensibility about getting hacked.
Yeah, Black Van's still out front, so it ain't over until it's over. And for everybody listening, and we will link to all the things we mentioned, including Pablos's website, the book.
Newsletter, etcetera.
at Tim.blog slash podcast. You can just I can guarantee you
That Pablos will be the only Pablos. So just search Pablos and Sounds plural, but there's only one. And you will find him immediately.
So
That is where you can find all the resources. And as always.
Be a little bit kinder than is necessary. Until next time.
to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
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