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

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Pablos Holman is a hacker and inventor and the author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs. Pablos also hosts the Deep Future Podcast and is managing partner at Deep Future. This episode is brought to you by:Cresset prestigious family office for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs: https://cressetcapital.com/timMaui Nui Venison​, delicious, nutrient-dense, and responsible red meat: https://mauinuivenison.com/lp/timAG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/timTimestamps:00:00 Intro01:16 The hacker mindset33:05 Nuclear52:35 Autonomous ships58:48 Pragmatic optimism01:00:29 Risk tolerance01:04:50 Blue Origin01:11:59 Zero Effect philosophy01:34:43 China01:43:07 Taiwan01:45:04 AI01:50:42 Salsa02:08:44 Deep tech investing*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out how they do what they do. My guest today terrified me so much when I first saw him in person, Pablo's Holman, that I effectively avoided him for 15 years, although we've crossed paths and now we are friendly, but I saw him stealing a few dozen credit card numbers from people on the front row of an event using hacking technology. And I thought, you know what, maybe I should just keep my distance. Pablo Holman 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, Pablo's worked on spaceships at Blue Origin, you know, that thing by 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 Gates. Pablo's hosts the Deep Future podcast, and his TED Talks have been viewed more than 30 million

times. He's also managing partner in 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 i suppose a bit from behind the scenes which i really enjoyed so you can find all things pablo's at deepfuture dot tech you can find him on x at pablo's at optimal at this altitude i can run flat out

for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now we'll have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living this year over metal endocrat. Me, Tim Ferriss Show. Where to begin, Pablo's? I don't even know where to start.

But I will start, perhaps, with my first glimpse of Pablo's, which was circa two. 2008, I think it was the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It could have been Google Ignite, but it was a demonstration. And I remember watching you. Let me actually take it to Wired Magazine for a second. This is what they wrote about this particular event. San Diego, California, your credit card, block on your front door, your cell phone's

voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think. As Pablo's Holman, a hacker-clad in all-black, gleefully demonstrated on stage, Wednesday like an evil Las Vegas magician. Holman used caller ID spoofing to break into the AT&T voicemail of the organizer of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference being held this week in San Diego. Using the speakerphone, Holman changed the outgoing message of the target, Brady Forrest, while he sat helpless in a back row. Maybe that's why I'm confusing with Google Ignite, because Brady also did Google Ignite at one point. Don't chuckle too much. The hack works for all many AT&T users, including anyone with an iPhone.

Holman continued to show how slag, is how you say that? Schlage. Schlage locks. The kind that you likely have in your front door your house can quickly be opened by banging a filed down key with a small mallet. Likewise, Holman used a snippet of JavaScript to create a link that forced CNNMoney.com to load a modified onion story saying that iTunes store would soon be selling Tim O'Reilly's home movies for $199 apiece.

then I'm just going to paraphrase here in the interest of time called up a volunteer this one a young man supporting a headband also had an RFID enabled credit card Holman waved a magic reader over the kid's pocket up pop the kid's credit card number and expiration date on the projection screen with a few digits Xed out turns out that after months of trying to figure out how to break the encrypted information transferred by the card Holman just bought a merchant card reader on eBay for $8. Now the only reason I think I may have been at a different event is because my memory, and maybe I conjured exaggeration for dramatic effect, is that you actually walked along the front line, the front row of the attendees, and then put all of their credit cards up on a screen. It was wild times. Wild times. So I just want to read some notes from a mutual friend of ours to give people a taste of where we're going.

I put shorthand here. Password stealing robot, question mark. Keychain unlocking within a square mile, question mark. Hardware in a car in Seattle downloading and re-uploading hard drives from unsecure Wi-Fi. Printing food,

things that taste like steak, question mark. Oh, man. So far that's all. Is that all fact-ish? 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 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 hours. Apple II'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, I know, a couple decades of my career was all about trying to do new things with computers and advanced computers and I didn't have any formal training. I didn't go to college. Software development was invented long after I got started. So there's a lot I didn't get that most people get. And so a hacker is somebody who I think is attracted to puzzles. They are attracted to computer security because it's a bottomless pit of puzzles. And I am trying at this point to hack everything but computers and I'm trying to rescue hackers out of the computer security department and get

them into, you know, helping go attack bigger problems. How did you end up acquiring a computer in Alaska? So my dad had put some of the first, you know, mainframes in the oil industry in the early 70s, let's say. So he kind of, he wasn't really a computer guy, but he had a notion that these things might be interesting. And when Apple needed customers at the beginning of Apple, they went to the oil industry because that was the big rich industry at the time my dad said sure we'll take one so i got one of the first apple twos so i'm like you know nine 10 11 years old at apple two i had a skateboard people were sure that neither of them was a good waste of time but it was a fair

fight you know like it was just too early and i was lit up about this thing you know apple two isn't very powerful and in those days computers weren't useful you know it didn't have hardly any memory. It was super slow, but I was lit up. And so I tried to convince everyone around me that this computer was going to be amazing someday. And no one believed me. They'd never seen a computer, but they were sure they weren't cool. And so I was like inviting girls over to my basement to show them my computer. 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. 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 the way through, and I'm going to do something dangerous because I just got off of opioid painkillers for my arm surgery. Try to pull from memory.

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 going to take out the screws, break into a lot of little pieces. You've met Sammy. He's the poster child for this, you know. He's violating the warranty before

he got the shrink wrap off. Cute. Just for entertainment value, people can listen to my conversation with Sammy Cam Carver to hear about his amazing adventures and his crime and punishment involving MySpace. Oh, yeah. Sammy is just, he's just the most delightful hacker. He's 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 he figured, 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 they look like they're all road. just rents all the way. They look like traffic jams. And so Sammy could manipulate the traffic. I mean, Google's since fixed this. But I often like to show off Sammy on stage. And so I've shown his exploits a bunch of times. And that's one of them.

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So do your due diligence. What makes for a good hacker? You know, the hackers have one way or another ended up, the people who start from that position I described. They're the ones who don't take the conventional wisdom of what something is for. Masters of off-label use. Yeah, off-label. And so they're creative, in a sense. They are the people who figure out what is possible. You can't invent a new technology by reading the directions. That's just never happened. Ever. So a hacker, you know, I'm interested in their minds as inventors. I'm interested in their minds as creative people who are going to

figure out how to elevate what humans can do. And so a good hacker is somebody who is willing to do that. 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 kind of suck as a magician. Yeah, you could probably tell me what I should do. And what I realize is magicians getting to know them are like these people who will spend an obscene amount of time more than anyone can imagine focused on the most useless thing. And they'll figure it out. They'll figure out something no one else could imagine ever figuring out. And that's part of how their capabilities, their tricks come together, the things they invent. And you know, you could say maybe what magicians are inventing is useless. And you could argue that a lot of what hacker, are inventing is useless. It's like, why are you spending all of your time trying to figure out how to fuck with Google Maps? They're just going to fix that bug and then it'll be useless. But to Sammy, it's no problem at all. That is what he wants to do with his time. And so I think a big

part of it too is this, you could say as a class, maybe hackers have ADHD, but they can focus on what they're interested in. And when they get interested in a puzzle, they'll just go deep. And so you have to do that as well to get somewhere that no one's gotten before. This is actually the reason I think I'm here because I want you to know that you are the hacker. You're like a very important hacker and you don't think of yourself that way. But the reason is you are the one who showed people that what hackers are doing can be taken places that are not computers. And you did that with all the things in your books. 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 I come from you. And it's also a very smooth segue because you mentioned two things that were of questionable value when you were a kid,

computers and skateboards. Rodney Mullen. Could you describe from people who Rodney Mullen is? Oh, man. So Rodney Mullen, I don't have to describe for anyone who ever touched a skateboard

because Rodney is the godfather of street skating. He's the guy who invented every single thing you've ever seen a kid do on a skateboard, including like he's the first one to like Ollie a skateboard which is the fundamental basis of all street skating I'm a shady skateboarder

but Rodney is one of my favorite people on earth he's such a delightful human and we spend all night hanging out together talking about everything but skateboarding I've used him as an example of an inventor again because I'm trying to show people that an inventor is a valuable and important thing hackers are one source of inventors but skateboarder is inventor.

There's a difference between Rodney and every other skateboarder. And that difference is that Rodney will imagine something in his mind that's never been done before, may be impossible. He can spend months every night trying to make it happen on a skateboard and then finally get it. 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, Rodney is way more important than me. But Rodney's childhood was in rural Florida, no neighbors, like a farm. And he had a little patch of cement in the driveway. His entire skateboarding life started there. No one around him could skateboard. He didn't have any influences. He just had his brain and the skateboard. So he invented what was possible.

And so I think that is so important. So it's kind of analogous to my Apple, too, and I'll ask it. 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 endth time, that's craft. That is not invention. That's not art. That's craft. You know, you need a skill to do it. Roddy, 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 he's the old one. He's literally the only one.

But how many music artists could you name? Yeah. Or painters. 100. Or like actors. And it's just the contrast to the extreme. It's our most important creative class, inventor, and they don't count. And I think we've got to fix that.

I want to dive into some of the personal, because some of the magic tricks, so to speak, I want to try to unpack a bit. It might be pearls before swine because I'm not technical. You do not know how to program. But I am curious, for instance, this robot, I don't remember its name. Oh, the hacker bot. The hacker bot with a printer attached, right? Oh, yeah.

Okay, what did this do? No, it had a screen, not a printer. Okay. How did that work? Okay. And what did it do? Maybe you could describe it. So it was like a long time ago.

So Eric Johansson is kind of my co-conspirator. on a lot of hacking stuff. He and I were hanging out. We went to one of those first robotics competitions, which are huge now. It's teenagers making robots that they turned into like a spectator sport. And we realized like, oh, these kids are making robots. If they can do it, we should be able to do it because we're super geniuses with a machine shop. I had the Blue Origin machine shop. So I figured we could build a robot. So we started, you know, like Eric is amazing. You know, you come up with an idea. He'll smoke cigarettes and stay up all night and get it done while I go to sleep. And so Eric, a great friend to have. Yeah, a great friend to have. So Eric starts trying to get

PWM controls and all stuff to build a robot. I bought the wheels, you know, I'm really, because 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. 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 everything the 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. Anywhere. Yeah. It'd drive up to them and then show them their passwords on the screen. Because, you know, we had all the tools for cracking Wi-Fi password. Yeah, we're cracking Wi-Fi at the time. One of our buddies had made a tool called Air Snort to crack Wi-Fi, and we were cracking

Wi-Fi and stealing passwords for fun. But the cool thing about the hacker bot was it was just insanely mediogenic kind of thing where everybody thought it was cute. It's a nefarious robot stealing your passwords, but people thought it was cute. So we realized we could, in those days, we were just trying to raise the alarm about how insecure everything was. And nobody gave a shit about it. No one wanted to hear from hackers.

But the hacker bot kind of got on television and that kind of thing. And so we learned something from that, how to contextualize the lesson. I made a lot of friends stealing passwords, too. Yeah, they're like, wow. Kind of got to keep your prospective enemies as close as possible. I came on armed. Honestly, I'm not going to lie. When I saw that demo at whichever conference it was, I was like, I don't know how close

I should get to this guy because if he decides that I'm a pain in the ass, I really am defenseless. I feel like I would just be bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. And so I was simultaneously incredibly curious, but I was very, very nervous. Fair enough. You're not the only one. Is it fair to say? And I tend to tilt a little dystopian. So I'll just disclose that in advance that if you are a legitimate target who is non-technical,

of a very competent hacker that your goose is cooked. I'm sure there are basic digital hygiene things that you can do. You've heard of all. What are your thoughts? Because I've talked to people, for instance, in the intelligence community, and they're like, oh, yeah. If you're the target of a state actor and the entire machine behind it, they're like, they're going to get your stuff.

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

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

to, then you're going to have a problem. What does the marketplace look like for zero day exploits, right? Because I've heard of say, Israeli developers formerly of intelligence, developing these exploits, these zero-click exploits from 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 now. 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 referral of a referral? Actually, some of them, I think these days they'll hang out a shingle.

I'm not going to name any here. But the point is, you could hackers who are finding exploits know who they are. And so then you sell it to a broker. And those guys have relationships with the shady folks at governments around the world. And that's the only people they'll sell to because otherwise they risk getting prosecuted in different jurisdictions. So they can get away with selling to a three-letter agency in the U.S., but you can't get away with selling it to even a corporation in the U.S. 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.

job for you, so you might play with seeing how I can use that to get Bitcoin wallets or something. Love Romania, by the way. I do too. Yeah. Amazing. I was just there a few months ago. Amazing hacker. Go to Brashoff, if you have the chance, folks.

Also, little known fact, lots of bears in Romania. I find that to be an appealing draw, but that's just me. In any case, are there pockets of incredible hacker density, geographically speaking, for whatever reason. You see this with all sorts of things where there's a particular tennis school in Russia that produces just an absurd percentage of top tennis players for a decade or two.

Or there's a million examples from a million disciplines. So does that exist for hacking? Is it like, oh, this particular city in China? Oh, this particular place in Uzbekistan or where. Yeah. Well, there's two things that cause that. So one is a center of gravity of technical excellence. And so you could say, you know, places like Hungary put out amazing mathematicians,

which translates to pretty good understanding of computers. Some of those Eastern European places had that and are still due. 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. You say had past tense. I don't know now because, again, I'm sort of hacking other. things, but we used to go to the chaos computer Congress in Germany, which is like the big

hacker convention. And, you know, we could blow their minds a little, but they could blow our minds a lot. Yeah. And so that was cool. But what happened is in the early 2000s, Microsoft started to get serious about computer security. And they started to import hackers to Seattle from everywhere. I was in Seattle at the time, again, graduating out of hacking and computer stuff 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 afterward. 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 SMS app. Talking about the movie with Ben Still. Not the movie. This is an app before Foursquare. It's like the predecessor to four square. And so you'd send a text to this one number and then it would go to all your friends. And so you'd send this text and like, I'm at the bar. And immediately like 100 friends would get the text and they're 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 think it's hard to say where a center of gravity is. Hackers have conventions that they go to now. What are the most interesting to you? DefCon kind of got a little out of control. I think it's a little too big.

And then we did Shmoo Khan for 20 years. This is the last year, though, so that one's over. But you could still go to Germany for CCC. That would probably be the best thing to do in the U.S. Leave my phone at my hotel room. Yeah, TourCon. 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. Yeah, CCC edition. Let me just pull on this geographic thread a little bit, and then we're going to move to other things. But this is from another of our mutual friends. So questions around geopolitics from a tech angle, in other words, who is leading and what? Do you have any thoughts on that? 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 war. You can lose very easily by not playing. And so for better or worse, I think it's important to think about these things this way. You know, you can kind of see it, if you're going to say geopolitically, on technology in general, China and the U.S. are definitely trying to play. Yep.

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, you're conduct semiconductors and AI. These days, those are the biggest ones. And the reason they're so big is they're generally applicable, computers,

can be applied to everything. They'll end up, if you haven't got one in your pocket by now, you will. I mean, 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. Now, there's a whole stack.

Software relies on the chips, which rely increasingly on energy. All these hyperscalers have woken up this year to the fact that a chip from Nvidia needs a shit ton of energy, and we've been burning gas to get it. So maybe we should find something better. So now there's a lot of attention on improving energy. I'm so excited about that. Do you think the hyperscalers will actually help resurrect nuclear energy in the U.S.? I think hypers are going to save us.

It's a crazy thing to say. It's a crazy thing to say, but you can thank meta and Microsoft and Google. And the reason is that we don't make enough energy on this planet. Now, you could say we make enough energy for Americans because we're not very price sensitive and we can just keep throwing money at it, but you will watch. Even not counting AI, you will see that energy demand is off the charts. 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're advertised to get you to buy it from them. Speaking of Dodgeball, I think in your book, you wrote that at one point, was it the Senate, was like switching players on a dodgeball team between Chevron and someone else? Well, yeah, I mean, I would say the oil industry probably staffed Congress for most of our lives. Now, it's hyperscalers. And so we are getting the legislation that we need. You know, last year, the most bipartisan bill I know of was called Advanced.

That was to build nuclear reactors in the U.S. Now Trump has signed multiple executive orders to build nuclear reactors and free it up. And it's working. The overhaul of the NRC. which regulates nuclear has been amazing. They're supportive and helpful. In my lifetime, they were usually a anti-nuclear activist group. We invented one of the most advanced nuclear reactors at the intellectual ventures lab, where I was before. And for the last 18 years, you've seen me on stage telling people, nuclear reactors are awesome, and they're coming, and they weren't coming.

And that is because the NRC regulated them into oblivion. That has all changed now. And as of this year, this is crazy. As of this week, so we have now a nuclear reactor company, I should describe, which has invented a reactor that fits in a borehole. They bury it a mile deep. So this reactor is unquestionably safe. It's like the size of a small car or something like that. It's the size of a Toyota, not more complicated than a Toyota.

And the thing can be made in a factory like a Toyota. but it's buried under 10 billion tons of rock. It's something that if anything went wrong, there'd be no radioactivity at the surface. It's a mile from anyone's backyard. 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 nuclear. There's a water in the borehole that goes down in cool. What's so fascinating is if you look at like a Fukushima type problem, there's these pumps that are supposed to be pumping water through the reactor core to cool it. And those pumps could fail. Well, the water pressure in the borehole from gravity creates enough pressure to cool the reactor. Gravity's been 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 years, build a test core at a national lab over a couple years, then build a commercial reactor in like 2029. The Department of Energy is pushing them to do all of that by July. They will deploy their first reactors in July. It's insane. It's awesome. And then we'll make thousands in a gigafactory. Do you think the U.S. is kind of a day late and a dollar short in terms of waking up to the reality? Because my understanding, and I'm not going to get the number right but looking at china they have yeah how many i think they have about

130 reactor projects and they tend to get them done on time on budget there's different technologies they're trying them all it takes them about three years to build the reactor and those are big ones they're smoking it's amazing is that well maybe it's cleaned up but mostly legacy technology in terms of yeah so there are different kinds of reactor technologies and i won't weigh in on that because I think we need a thousand silver bullets and I kind of want them all to succeed. Obviously, I invest in the ones I think are the best. But the future of reactors involves a bunch of advanced reactor technologies. 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? Just because the 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 want to go. That might take a while. So the deep fission reactor that I described that goes in the borehole, no new technology, just a simple design, and you get the containment for the price of a hole. And we have a whole industry that's real good at holes. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft,

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you trust to advise the current administration on what the U.S. needs to do to remain globally, strategically, advantaged, right? Or at least not lose. Yeah. What are some of those pieces of advice that you would give? Wow. Well, I'd say the number one thing is going to be energy.

In energy, the number one thing is fission reactors. Love fusion, hope we get it someday. Don't hold your breath. We have other technologies that I think could happen sooner than fusion that we can talk about, like space solar. But I would say aggressively deploy nuclear reactors, make that as easy is possible. I mean, the biggest problem remaining is the litigious nature of the U.S. So you start a nuclear reactor project. You get a thousand lawsuits. We've got to squelch that

because we're competing with China, and China doesn't have that problem. And so make a clean regulatory track that makes it possible to deploy these things at scale. So that's the most important thing. If you get nuclear reactors, you solve a lot of other problems for free. And so I think that with limited attention span, that would be where my focus would be. Commercially, we can take care of the chips and everything after that. I, maybe just patting

myself on the back here in a self-congratulatory way, but when you talk about sequencing, picking the proper sequence of problems to solve, it just makes me so happy because 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 80, 20 analysis, but it seems like the secret sauce that is kind of self-evident when you really peer closely at it that gets ignored a lot is the sequencing. Yeah. Or it's like, yeah, you can try to fix these 18 separate issues, but if your lead domino is solving for energy, then those either become irrelevant or they become a lot easier to

solve. The great, you know, example to me was how, like, recycling played out in the US. You know, we've been recycling our whole lives. Right now, it's kind of a wash. You'd probably burn less gas making fresh plastic than if you try to recycle these plastic bottles and things. And we're 50 years into that. And so it's just putting the cart before the horse. Recycling is going to work great once you have a nuclear reactor to power your recycling plant. But we're not there. We're burning gas to do it. And you watch out your window when the truck comes, it's going to pick up the trash and the recycling and throw them in the same truck.

It's not working. We're not being honest about that, and it placates people. They feel like they did their part, separating stuff out. So I think it's one of the things I'm trying to convey to people with technologies is you can't keep putting the cart before the horse. We don't have time to keep, scaling the wrong thing. We've got to pick something that's going to work and then go build that. And you can just do basic arithmetic to get those answers a lot of the time. So solve energy

first. You know, if you want to go do carbon captured, pick CO2 molecules. What is it? 400 parts per million. Four hundred parts per million means 400 needles in a haystack with a million pieces of straw. That's what we're talking about. So good luck. I think you want 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 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 much 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. I guess I'm thinking that more production of plastic would mean more microplastics and there are issues with a larger volume of plastics besides the energy equation, I guess. But I don't know how you think about that. So 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. Yeah.

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 describe them, please fact check me if I'm getting this off, but that with deep tech,

and you should probably define what that means, 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. But I'm wondering how you think about and assess as an investor regulatory risk and all of the red tape and bramble bushes that entail getting something like that to launch or adoption. You have built or indirectly funded people who have built much better mousetraps, like quite a lot.

and been involved with Nathan Mervolt's lab and building technology for, say, reducing the likelihood or severity of hurricanes, simple tech, which we could get into. It's like, why the hell isn't it being used? Yeah. Okay. So there's a few things there. I usually get involved when I see a technology that I think is 10 times better than state of the art. If you go to like Hewlett-Packard, there's somebody there who's an engineer that's super smart,

figuring out how to make inkjet printers like 1% better, which is awesome. But I want the guy who's figuring out how to make whatever comes after inkjet. So two times better, there's probably not enough margin there to ensure that you can go the distance. But 10 times better, that's a real window. You know, it's 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times more efficient, 10 times on any metric could be a good window. So that's kind of where I see deep tech breakthroughs as becoming sort of contenders. Then we try to invest in them and help get them out of the lab or out of the garage and into a startup. So that's what I'm looking for in the world. Now, that's a much different thing than what we're both very familiar with startups and venture capital and probably audiences to the last couple

decades of Silicon Valley, let's say, have evolved a very impressive machinery for funding iPhone apps to have weed delivered to your dorm room by a drone. They're not going to take on nuclear reactors. You can't take a nuclear reactor and go knock it on doors in Silicon Valley and expect to get a response. Maybe this week is getting better. But the point is, we've been funding these sass holes for decades instead of actual technologies. And that's okay. That's cool to make software and it's a good, I think good practice run. If you're an entrepreneur and you made an app, cool. Practice. Now take on a new technology that's a 10x multiplier in some 100 year old industry where nobody in Silicon Valley has touched it. To me, that's where the action is. I think I can

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 going to do anyway. I do things like, say, new algorithms in AI, but I wouldn't do applied AI, you know, things like that. So things that move the needle on what's possible, new chip architectures I do. But anyway, the point is, let's get back to hardware in a minute. When you're investing, you're looking at risk, as you described. So all of Silicon Valley, you could say, is fixated on market risk.

So we have milestones like MVP, product market fit, those kinds of things, because that's a way to reduce market risk. Technical risk, you never heard of it. If I can draw an iPhone app on a napkin. Except in my biotech investing. Okay, that's different. Yeah. We'll leave Boston out of this. But for software investment, there's really not technical risk that much these days. If you can draw it on Canva, then we can make it. Okay. So what I'm doing is the opposite. I take a lot of technical risk. Can we build this nuclear reactor? Can we put solar panels in space? Can we do whatever? But the day that I get through that, the day we get through that, the day the first reactor goes in the ground and lights up, there's no more technical risk. works, you can see it. And there was never any market risk because I just have vast industrial markets, trillion dollar markets. And that's very important to understand. 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 And so the size of the markets, if you're one of these SaaS investors and you see a tam of $10 billion, let's say, for a Zoom or a Slack or something, that sounds good. If you add up all the software companies in the world, including Microsoft and meta and everybody combined, their combined revenue is about $2 trillion a year. the global GDP is over a hundred trillion dollars a year. So Silicon Valley is doing 2% of what humans rely on. That other 98% is my TAM. Is top line revenue and GDP a fair comparison? It's, I mean, you could nitpick over the details. It's actually, 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. 98% if you fact check me, I'm going to win. Okay, 98% of what's left is that's energy, but it's shipping. Shipping is a $2 trillion industry as big as software. We could talk about that. Durable goods. And by shipping, you mean mostly ocean-based? Yeah. 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. 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 heavy activity on the planet and learning through your book about the different types of fuel and just how the congestion at ports caused by extraordinarily large sea-borne container ships, cargo ships, which is a necessity to reduce drag because they're optimizing for fuel. and the alternative that you propose seems like a no-brainer, right? I think so.

Well, wait a second. Is it like the Greek and Chinese cartels, so to speak, like the sort of... So you've named two more kinds of risk. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what are we talking about? All right, well, so that, 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 a JC? Is that a... Yeah. And so, you know, other than that, it's probably going to 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 $2 trillion 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 backup to get out of the dead zone but we're actually really good at weather prediction because even cargo ships now need to avoid storms and so the weather prediction has improved so much we're really good at that but yeah your

worst case scenario is you got a ship full of bananas and they're stuck in a dead zone so we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone. And then they sail themselves. Why are 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. 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 ship sales? Do we sell this to Maersk? That would be like Uber selling to Yolo Cab.

No, we build the next Marisk. That's the opportunity. Would you have rather built Uber or Maersk? So that's where... I mean, Mearsk just might take it into hospice, right? Risk of assassination is high. I grant that, maybe higher than even in taxis, because there are a few big cabals globally that run the shipping industry. You might need a partner with one of them. But that's a tomorrow problem. The truth is, we can do this.

Pablo's one day, I'm going to ask you for a favor. Yeah, I might need one myself. So after this, 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 wobblies having shootouts with the sheriff's office. I mean, this is crazy stuff in the history of labor. So, you know, you've got to be careful about who you put out of a job. But I think it's, One of these exciting things. What you mentioned is the reason ships are so big is because you get a drag advantage. You get improved drag. When you double the size of a ship, your drag only goes up by 50%. So you're incentivized to build a biggest ship you can.

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

I mean, I guess you need to get to a certain position of dominance in order to clear the congestion at ports. you would need to start replacing a lot of the container ships that are clogging. I mean, that would be great, but 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. Sail your Happy Meal Toys to Islands. Is Pablo's a common name in Alaska?

Pablo's is a totally fake name because all hackers have fake names. Is the last name fake, too? I'm not trying to fly below the radar at this point. I got that username on a mainframe when I was like 12, and I don't even remember how. So I've been called Pablo's for longer than anyone can remember. 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 20 years, which is kind of why they ended up on the cover of the book and people associate me with the glasses. These are the best glasses ever made, which is why I started wearing them. Because I'm in labs all the time, I kind of need safety glasses that wrap around. Are they prescription?

Yeah. Okay. I've been wearing glasses since I was four, but I started 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, they could do whatever they wanted. And they built this factory in like Nevada to make titanium frames. But this is intensive to do, 425,000 watts to make one pair of frame. And they have all these volatile gases in the casting process. And so eventually the factory blew up and nobody will ever make glasses this way again. But I've been wearing the same ones for 20 years. You can't break them. I have a few pairs that I cycle out because the nose bridge gets loose and I got to

guy who will tighten up. But, you know, two pairs would have lasted this long. Yeah. I have more just in case I live a couple extra lifetimes. I've been stockpiling them. Are you optimistic? Would you describe yourself as optimistic? Well, people cast me that way, and I think it's probably fair. But what I wrote in the book about that is that I think I'm not a Pollyannish optimist. Like, I don't think everything's going to be awesome. What I think is the future could be awesome, that we have some volition in this, that we build that future ourselves with the toolkit we have. That toolkit is largely the technologies we have. And so I think it's up to us to try.

It's up to us to decide where we want to go, what we want to aim for, what future we want to build and do that. So I call it Possibleist. So I think a future that's awesome is absolutely possible. A shady future is also possible, but the balance is up to us. And so that's how I would describe that. Let's talk about the B word for a second, billionaires. So I know of at least three. You don't need to name names, although you mention a few publicly who just find you to be the shiniest, most attractive hire. And I want to know, why you think that is? Because they're not looking for script 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 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 get, the heart of what you're getting at is probably what you could say about me is I do have a kind of extreme risk tolerance. My whole career, I've only worked on things that I thought were cool or interesting. I'll optimize for that over everything else. I've gone broke a bunch of times because I worked on things that were like way too soon or way too cool or way too expensive.

I'm not going to do that anymore. But I'm okay with that because I'm good at doing things I'm interested in. I think people are optimized for that, you know. I don't find that I'm effective if I'm working on something that's not interesting. So I've always optimized to 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' words. Shiny meaning attractive, by the way. Not just like a crow collecting buttons or something, I'm just saying. Yeah, I mean, some of these are just circumstances that I ended up being open to when most people wouldn't. I'd say that's the biggest thing. And I think it's replicable.

Other people could do that. Think about your worst case scenario. Your startup fails. You end up on your mom's couch, regroup, try again. For most people you and I know, most people in the U.S., 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. But when I think Nathan Merville, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, all Seattle, right? So is there some engineered serendipity placing yourself in the right location? is that less of a factor? Okay, so I was in Silicon Valley before that, and I would say the main

reason I left is that sock puppet attack. What does that mean? In 2001, everything in Silicon Valley got shut down because of the dot-com bubble. And so it was a wasteland. I mean, it was this. What does that mean? I like it. Oh, yeah, sockpocket attack. Because the, Host or 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. You're like the end is nigh. The end was nigh. And it's because, you know, everything was overhyped. Too much money was put into too many dumb things. Yeah. I have a bad attitude about this because we had real technologies, you know, and we got shut down too. I don't like

what I see in Silicon Valley. It's too much crap, not enough actual technology. We over-indexed on entrepreneur, and we threw the inventors under the bus. It's time to course correct. I want to find, I want the guy from WeWork, and I want to give him a nuclear reactor. Like, let me arm you. If you are an entrepreneur that wants to build a company, great, let me arm you with IP, with an invention, with a CTO. I can hook you up, only the good ones. So that's kind of where I think this goes. the we work founders, a controversial choice. No, no, I'm just... I'll take the Uber founder, any good, any founder.

Yeah, controversial otherwise. 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 2001, everything got shut down. Silicon Valley was a wasteland.

You couldn't start companies, couldn't do hardly anything. So I ran out of excuses to pay rent and go broke in San Francisco. Francisco. And so Seattle was like for the price of rent in San Francisco. I could rent like a whole neighborhood. And I was like, oh, try that. 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 going to bring him up, so glad you did. Yeah. So, Neil, if you're any kind of nerd,

Neil is a demigod. So Snow Crash, Metaverse. Yeah. I mean, when did Cryptonomicon come out, which I love. 98. Okay. So, so sort of early glimmers of crypto. So I was working on cryptocurrency in 98 when Cryptonomicon 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 dot-com bubble sock puppet attack. So Jeremy introduced me, Neil, Neil said, hey, we're building a lab to do some cool stuff. You know, come check it out. So I went down to this lab.

So Neil and an astrophysicist named Keith Rosamah had gotten this old envelope factory and turned it into like a machine shop. They like bought a machine shop on surplus and actually the crusty old machine has kind of came with it. So they were trying to build what was called Blue Operations and it was, and I went down there and like, hey, 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 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 90% fuel. So when you light up a rocket, you're just burn and fuel to get out of Earth's gravity well. Cargo ship plus. Yeah, right. Totally. So can't make rockets sail.

But we thought maybe you could. So what if you could just take the payload, the craft, the part you want, you know, people are the stuff or the satellites, and then beam power to it from the ground, which sounds kind of crazy, but every day gets easier and easier. Like, we have the technologies that could do that now. So I think eventually we will do these things. But the problem was, you know, Jeff Bezos was the one who started Blue Origin. He's the one funding it. And in those days, Jeff was worth like $7 billion. and our job was to figure out what we could do with like one.

That's a ballsy bet. So, yeah. He's done 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 $50 billion hole inventing some new propulsion scheme. So we have a bunch of ideas that were really cool. And this, again, started 2001.

I'm going to go to Blue Origin next week for the 25th anniversary. I get to meet some of the stuff. I don't have anything to do with it anymore, but hopefully get to meet some of the folks who are taking that and running with it. But the last thing I worked on was we built this terrifying craft with four Rolls-Royce jet engines that we retooled to operate vertically and made like a quadcopter out of them. Sounds safe. It's totally not safe.

This is before you could buy a quadcopter. at, you know, Walmart. So we had to write all the code to do self-balancing and stuff on these microcontrollers and get it working and do trust vectoring and all this. Anyway, we drug this thing out into the desert in central Washington. We fire the thing up and it goes up and flies around like a UFO and then it comes and back down and does vertical landing. So we proved that it could be done. And that was the day we decided to 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 going to be at a left field, but I like at a 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 because 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 code I'm writing. I'm not that guy. But because my depth of knowledge is deep, I can appreciate

another expert's depth of knowledge. And I think that that helps me to work with folks. A lot of people get pigeonholed into just the thing. You know, we see that with scientists or engineers a lot. That's, they're specialized too much. And if you look at like millennials, they're kind of typically very flat. They just, you know, I could do anything, but they can't do anything well. And M dash shape person. M dash per, yeah, M dash. M dash. 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 pretty much. professionally damaging. For sure. I'm a hacker. Yeah. So I can ask all the dumbest questions in the world because nobody, they think I'm a little bit smart, a little bit dangerous, but if I don't actually know about shipping or rockets, I mean,

I had to learn physics on the job. You know, I'm working with actual astrophysicists who know about rockets, and I have to understand what does Delta V mean? And I'm like, Googling that shit on the side. So I had to learn those things on the job. And I'm more fluent now, but I'm not formally trained in those things. But it's okay for me to ask a dumb question about rockets. And so I think that helped me a lot.

It's my job to ask dumb questions. Yeah, and you get away with it too. Yeah. So that's really cool. And you're doing such a good job of that because you've been able to bring in people, whereas someone else, and you can see this when you see experts interview people, it's not interesting. It doesn't go anywhere because they can't ask those dumb questions.

Ask me some dumb questions. We'll prove it right now. Okay. Okay. Zero effect. Oh, man. What is Zero Effect? You and Alonle 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, he got it from me. This is like a philosophy that drives me. Okay. So there was a film called The Zero Effect that was like Ben Stiller made it 20 years ago. 1998, yeah. Okay.

The main character is the world's greatest private detective. And at one point in the film, he's articulating his philosophy of being the world's greatest private detective. 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... It's 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 like the most wild venture fund ever. We invest in things that sound crazy. and I have to be open most of them even I don't like them at the beginning even I'm like that sounds crazy

but I have to force myself to stay open let the founders try and explain why it's not actually crazy and you know by the time we invest I'm convinced and I understand enough that it's like okay it sounds crazy but isn't you know by now I'm in the business of things that sound like complete bullshit but aren't right I have to be right enough times that they're not but I got to be open. So I think the zero effect is how I think about staying open to finding anything. So people come at me with perpetual motion devices every day now. And, 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. Or at least a lot of them. So, you know, if one of them works, I'll have it. So that's

kind of the game. And I think more people would get something out of that approach to life than the opposite, which is much more common, which is, you know, people are trying so hard to be so sure and be right all the time. And they really aren't anyway. They're spectators in the world. They're not building something anyway. So I think be open to things and be supportive. One of the best things about Silicon Valley in the 90s was the way everybody was like that. You know, you could just walk down the street, find a homeless dude, start telling them about self-sailing cargo ships or nuclear reactors. You'd be like, oh, cool, man, my college roommate is an astrophysicist and might be able to help you with that. Like, everybody was in on it.

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 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 ignore. War games? The only 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

them exactly how to make it go so that real hackers will get on board. And then by the time the movie comes out, my influence is completely lost. It's just fake access control override again. What is the enhanced photo? Enhance photo. That's one of my favorites. I know enhanced. It's such bullshit. Although enhanced photos working pretty well now. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's a thing. 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 check, 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 in England. Great handle. And so the remote key buttons that you have for your car, they're kind of like RFIDs. They have a battery in them so they can emit a signal and 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. I 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, to manipulate the key. So he's able to manipulate the key to open any and he explained this to me. And I don't know if he was drunk or what, but he probably shouldn't have. and so

go by the dealership and you can open any so that was just a at the time I wasn't going to say the name of the brand but you did so yeah it was I mean we can bleep it out one brand of cars

can open any car from that manufacturer I think they probably have fixed this by now but you would have to or at least in modern cars I sure hope so I'm not going to say how to do it but yeah that's a vulnerability that has poor foresight because in those days, this is an old attack, so I don't mind talking about too much. You don't have a system update. Those cars are not online. Now a Tesla and

modern cars almost all have an internet connection and they can run system update, which is a very important way of reducing a tax surface for vulnerabilities. So now that cars have system update, we could fix something like that remotely, but in those days you couldn't. And so it was a pretty wild attack for a while. Well, I guess it still is if you're going after vintage vehicles, potentially. Maybe, yeah. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. Yeah, yeah. No, that's... All right. I'd be curious to know, and there was another friend who popped up in your book,

Chris Young. So I've spent a ton of time with Chris Young or 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. No, Neil is 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 got all the club bells and for a while. while was training with a Sherlock Holmes-esque cane. I forgot. What's that called Bartitsu? It's great. I mean, I really love Neil. He's delightful. But he would spend about half his day writing in the

morning and then 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, even before he created his empire, with longer time horizons than anyone else, just changing the timeframe. Yeah. Of thinking and planning. What else have you gleaned from some of these books? Well, that one, I would, I think it's a very important one because you sort of, like you said, sort of flippantly mentioned billionaires

and people get pissed off about these folks as soon as they're rich, just because they're rich or successful. But often what I see is it's blinding them, is blinding people to learning what is it that made those people successful? What is it that's good? What is it that's replicable? What are the lessons? And that's why I think, you know, we kind of need you to pay attention them because for better or worse, more people probably listen to you than these billionaires. And so you can 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, because 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 going to be around for that, but it might take thousands of years to craft that future for humanity. You know, in the best case scenario, Earth just melts into the sun, and that's if nothing else wipes us out in the meantime. So we got to, if you believe in the sanctity of human life, you believe in humans are something special, and I do, then in the long run, you want to build

kind of a plan B, if not planet B. So that's what Blue Origin is about. Now, that's going to take generations, maybe millennia to do, but even so, it would start with one small step. Blue Origin is that one small step. Can we get it started? And it's actually a really amazing thing. And so I learned to start by thinking on longer term horizons. And that's not super like a thousand year project to build space call. And he's obviously not very relevant to me. I run a 10 year venture fund like everybody else who's an investor. So what does that mean for me? Well, it gives me a way to think about new technologies. If I look at this nuclear reactor that goes in a borehole as an example or this cargo ship, and I say, all right, 100 years from now, are we going to be burning nasty

bunker oil to move those heavy meal toys around? Or would we make these self-sailing cargo ships? It's like such an easy thing to answer, anybody could do it. You don't need to be smart. You don't need to know anything about tech to answer that question. As soon as you extend the horizon. In 100 years, anything could happen. In 100 years, the regulatory environment could change. Maris could be out of business. All the cabals could be out of business, whatever. All the things, any objection you have probably could be solved in 100 years. So then ask yourself, does it have to take 100 years? Or, could we do it in 10? And if you can start to craft a vision for how to do it in 10, then you align with a lot of the machinery in the world that works. Venture funds are all 10-year funds. I can't invest in things that take 20, but I can't invest in things that take 10. So all the money is in 10-year funds. So people's careers could do, you know, they could sign up for a 10-year project, but a 20-year project might be too much. So that's the kind of thing that helps me, craft a vision for what I could invest in. Like, okay, ships, yeah, we could do that in

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

were successful in less than 10 years. But not just that. The Apollo program. was less than 10 years. The space shuttle program, the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal. Empire stapling was like 18 or 24 months or something insane. Right. So what are we sitting on our thumbs for making more iPhone apps? 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? what's happening in the world around us. We need to solve all the things in that window. Like, let's build in less than 10 years, everything. Do you think that Elon actually wants to

colonize Mars, or is that a clever visual and story to tell to marshal public interest and support and so on? Or do you think that whether it's Jeff or Elon or someone else, that the most practical future we're looking to off planet is something closer to Elysium, where it's in sort of a self-contained, large-scale ISS city of some sort. Two things there. One, I do know, Jeff. I don't know Elon, so I know as much as you. I've seen publicly what he's done.

I'm a little more, I don't know if it's just because of Blue Origin, but I'm a little more on the space colony side of things than on the, the Mars thing. You only get one Mars anyway. And so it doesn't seem like that good of a destination. 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 doesn't exactly appeal to me. I've had enough of that. I want to be in a city with people. But I think it goes back to the thing that matters to me is what I said before. People are blinded. They're pissed off about Elon for one thing or another, and it blinds them to learning. That guy

is showing us. Here's how you make modern industries. 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. Well, you also don't like, 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, because they wanted to solve malaria, they wanted to solve HIV, they wanted to go after some big global scale problems. And the reason it's called One is that they wanted to get all these constituencies

from around the world to focus on this problem, and they only had to agree about this one thing. We only have to agree about this one thing, which is that we need to solve HIV. Yeah, we don't agree about all this other stuff. We don't even like the same music. We need the Republicans and the Democrats and the autocrats all together for this one thing. That had a big impression on me because I think it is important. We don't all agree about everything. I'm a cypherpunk.

We don't agree about a lot of things, okay? that's okay and most of my friends I want them for what they're good for and what we can work on together so yeah I'm with you on that and that's why I can work for people who I mean I probably don't agree with everything people I work with are about but we need like a thousand Elons maybe they don't all need X accounts but we need a thousand Elons and we need them to go after all these things and that's how we're going to build the future so this is uh this is from a New York Times article from 2018. Oh, man.

This may not be relevant anymore, but I have attended a lot of conferences. You've been to a lot of conferences. Yeah. I've heard of most of them, but one popped up Mars conference. Oh. I don't even know if it still exists, but what was it like to attend that? Oh, yeah. So, well, Mars is...

And what is it? So that's just a small event. So Jeff Bezos has that event annually. it's for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. So Jeff and Amazon organize it. It's a really delightful event because we bring in the world's experts in those four things. And we've been doing that for like a decade. And so it's a way to make a peer group out of people who often are siloed because they're

researchers in a lab somewhere. They wouldn't necessarily party together otherwise. And so it's a very important thing. I'm oddly like probably the one person 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 often are peerless in a sense because they're world-class experts in their thing. you're surrounded by people who are smarter than you. We'll have five or ten Nobel Prize winners, and we don't even put them on stage. So it's a rarefied group. And I'm convinced that these things are so important because people need a community.

And we have a WhatsApp group where we sort of stay in touch with each other the rest of the year. And people are very supportive and helpful. And it's just a, you know, wherever you are, I mean, look, you don't need Mars, but you do need a community. And so one cool thing about Silicon Valley, if you're into, I guess, like right now, AI-type stuff, you could definitely find a community there.

The Deep Tech founders are having a harder time because there's no geographic center of gravity. So we're trying to, at least for our founders, help them get that going. But man, it's- Well, this is a good- Community Matters. Good time to explain why the hell we're sitting where we're sitting. What 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, I think, a kind of a public, private partnership with the city to build this thing. And they've been at this for like a decade. I've been friends with the founders for that whole time and just so impressed with what they've done. I actually don't have anything to do with it. I'm pimping New Lab because if you have a deep tech startup, these folks

can help. And I think it would be great to attract more deep tech founders to these things because they built this one. And they built one in Detroit. It's even bigger. And it's 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, 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 77. I'm like, where the hell is building 77? Okay, you drop a pin. Apparently the main gate is under construction.

I'm like, okay. So I walk over, and then you're like, walk all the way through that building. There's a turnstile with a guard, but he is easy to sigh up. Then go out and left. And I'm like, building five, sci up completed and I'm out and walking left. We're going to come back to the sci up. Then you say the big building straight ahead is your target. Get to that and then go left.

No number on it. Entrances at the far corner of the building. And then I said, am I being set up for a podcast kidnapping? Very elegant. Like, where the hell am I going? he said I'll come out and meet with the black van and there was actually a black fan and I'm like wow is this just 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 could be the long con it's an amazing long con well my dating life has been very colorful because of every you know every girl who's dating me ends up 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 Mittnicks, the art of deception. Yeah. Which, uh, you made a face. Oh, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Tell me, tell me what that's about. Well, look, I mean, Kevin's a delightful human, you could say. He's dead now, so we don't want to say anything bad about him. But, you know,

hackers kind of rallied around him because he was one of the first hackers to get thrown in jail. Most hackers, like, I don't know, if you're elite, Kevin is kind of a joke because he was a good social engineer. Well, that's why I bring it up, because you mentioned SIOP, and as far as I could tell, 90% of the book was social engineer. 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 SIOP, was that a joke? Or is that something? No, I had gone through building, 77 and I'm like, hey, go into new lab and you just waved me through. So that's what I'm like, I think this will be an easy challenge for you. Yeah, got it. All right. Yeah. Anyway, I want to ask you a bit more about China. So I used to, I lived in China for a period of time. I went to two

universities there, studied Chinese, the whole nine yards, spend about oddly enough right now, 20% of my time probably speaking Chinese, resurrecting my Chinese right now. Wow. And that that's actually an exaggeration, but it's like 10 to 20%, probably. And I have been so simultaneously impressed and terrified by China on so many different levels. You and me both. And there was a book Tyler Cowan recommended, great, amazing guy, everybody should check out. There's a book called Breakneck. Oh, yeah.

And I haven't yet read it, but one of my employees is reading it and recommended it. He said it's an amazing page turner, really well researched. And the reason I mentioned 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 U.S. have backgrounds as attorneys, whereas a lot of leaders in China have backgrounds as engineers. And I have been chewing on that. I just learned about this yesterday, but I'm wondering what impresses you about China? Because they really seem to have their act together. The homogeneity, relatively speaking, of the country helps. The speed with which the CCP can execute, top down, helps tremendously.

But anything else come to mind? 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. Sounds more fun than memorizing characters, frankly. It's helped a ton.

I really opened up my eyes to China. So, yeah, my fiancee is Chinese, but been in America long enough that she'll put up with me. And I think the insight from that book, I haven't read Breakneck yet. It's a relatively new book. I am also just kind of a spectator on what's happening in China. But you have a unique multidisciplinary technical lens that includes deep tech.

can tell you, I think there's a couple of major factors. And the insight about the preponderance of lawyers I think is huge and really important. So I'm excited about reading that book. The reason we invented LLMs is to put lawyers out of business so we can fix this country. And I think that's going to work. So if you are a parent right now, don't send your kid to school to become a lawyer because we're going to replace all the lawyers with AI. I think where this goes, I'm optimistic. I know I'm taking an aside here, but I'm only half joking about that. I mean, I use LLMs on a weekly basis for legal first passes already.

For lawsuits, good. No, for all my lawsuits. But I'll give you an example. I mean, this will be no surprise to you. But with just off-the-shelf basic chat GPT or fill in the blank for your favorite LLM, I was selling a property in rural New York. and it was taking kind of forever to get done. There were a lot of arcane local laws and so on.

And I wanted to protect the land from overdevelopment. So I wanted to create deed restrictions. Oh, I wanted to create deed restrictions, which are very tricky, make the sale complicated because it's encumbered in a way the resale value is reduced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I just threw in 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. 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, you know, if you're running a business, we build a computational model of your business now, not an LLM, but still an AI, where you can run simulations of your business and

you can figure out how to optimize your business. That's all happening right now. If you're in business not doing this, be terrified. Because by next year, your competitors will be doing this. So I take heart because what I think is it means 100 years from now, governments will do that too. So if you haven't seen this, it didn't get as much airtime as I would have expected, but Abu Dhabi is implementing that right now for legislation. It's unbelievable. And it seems like there were a lot of people who poked fun at it, or I saw a lot of people who were like, 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. It's remarkable what they're

already doing. These are tools to help humans make better decisions. Now, an LLM is the wrong tool for lots of kinds of decisions, but AI overall can be applied to help make better decisions, and that is where we're going. And so when governments figure this out, and it's great to see that some of these countries are leading the charge, when you see a country like the UAE and you see what good leadership can do, it's kind of embarrassing. Democracy needs a little maintenance work. And I'm hoping that this class of tools is going to help us level up and fulfill our potential. So that is where that goes. What I think about it is China has done a great job of a lot of things.

And it would be great to have like a Netflix series where like every episode shows something amazing from China that sucks in the U.S. I just think that's the kind of story people need to get in their head just to see that contrast and realize we're not playing in the major leagues in a lot of things.

So we need to step up. And I think, you know, there's a lot that's impressive about China. I obviously, I'm an Alaskan, like a supercharged American. So look, I think 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've got to give them credit for the things that they're good at.

Now, the thing that's missing here is a respect for that engineering mindset, a respect for like you described, putting the dominoes in order, a respect for building thoughtfully, respect for basic arithmetic or respect for building the future that we want. We need to work on that. China's problem, no respect for me, for the hacker mindset, for the renegade, for the creative person, for the crazy ones. Like, they don't make room for that. And it's hurting their ability to do new things. Now, they're kicking ass by just waiting for us to figure shit out and then implementing it faster and better than us. So we've spent most of our life worried about China copying us.

We need to figure out how are we going to copy China. And I think that's a wake-up call where we're at right now. Yeah, very curious to see where it all goes. Yeah, me too. They're moving at remarkable speed with implementation on so many fronts. And that's great for humanity. I mean, it really is. I mean, they should get a Nobel Prize for bringing their country

out of extreme poverty. We should probably get one for, you know, I don't know, like making global trade possible with our Navy or something. But, you know, there's also a lot of accolades that I think we're not giving to China that we should. So I want to get your take. I wasn't planning on asking this, but I'm curious about

since you've looked at autonomous shipping vessels, you have familiarity in that domain. I'd like to talk about, for instance, Taiwan for a second. So I've spent time in Taiwan. I love Taiwan. Absolutely adore that place. Incredibly friendly. Food is amazing. The culture has been preserved in a way that was not true through the culture revolution in mainland China. And everybody should go visit. It's just an amazing place. Now, it's also a tiny speck of an island that happens to be incredibly valuable for a number of different reasons, primarily chip production. And there's a lot of discussion

around what, say, an amphibious assault might look like, how China might exert pressure on Taiwan non-violently, which I think is the most probable path. But on one side, you have these statistics that are related to shipbuilding capacity. And China has, I'm going to get this number wrong, but what is? It's like 30x, 300x, the U.S. capacity. And I believe they also record. that any commercial vessel over a particular size needs to be manufactured or built to military spec just in case they need to be requisitioned or otherwise enrolled in an attack. Now, we're not going to catch up with that in the next two years. It's just, it's a logistics and possibility. But you do have some startups like Anderil, for instance, that talk about

the only path forward to create a counter attack in such a scenario would be lots and lots of small autonomous, like weaponized marine vessels. Do you think there's a there there? I do think the nature of ballistic warfare is changing. I think the case andrel would make is fairly compelling. I think we probably need a lot more anderals. I'm not the the guy who should weigh in on the geopolitics of Taiwan. But I think, you know, it's not hard to look at that and say, all right, why can't we do that? Now, one of the criticisms often made of, like, American schools is that they were, the whole structure was invented to make factory workers after the war.

Well, now that we need some factory workers, where are they? Like, we don't have them. What we've got are like only fans, creators. So could some of them maybe help us out in a factory? You know, we need to build a lot of things. And I think if you look around, we're just miscalibrated. You know, you and I barely have to work. You don't know.

Most anybody you know hasn't worked a day in their lives. We're not digging coal out of a mind. We're sitting in front of a laptop wondering when, you know, how long is the line at Starbucks. You know, it's just not even close. I think we need to recalibrate on our expectation of what it means to work. I think we're optimized for work. We're evolved to work. You wonder about why are people depressed?

I mean, not everyone. I don't need to disparage anybody who is dealing with something like that. But you're evolved to be useful to the world around you, to the people around you. And if you can't see how your work is useful, yeah, you're going to get depressed. I mean, I think that happens a lot. I'm not saying the only reason, but when you have a whole society that doesn't really do anything where you can see how anyone gives a shit about what you do, that's not going to be very healthy. So I think we just need to recalibrate in our society and recognize it like, okay, everybody needs to do something that matters, do something where they can see how it matters.

I'm good at connecting dots, so I can do things where I see how it matters in a thousand years, and I'm good. but most people might be better off if they're like a nurse where you can like see yeah i help that person today you know our nurse is depressed they might be depressed about having to do a lot of paperwork but they're probably not depressed about their work the meaning i don't mean to belittle anyone who's depressed i'm just saying as an example we could be a much happier healthier society if we're doing things that where we can see how it helps our world helps our society so building stuff is a good example of that because you can build a thing and you can see I built that thing and somebody's using it and that's awesome. Like are Tesla factory workers depressed? I don't know.

Or maybe swap out depressed for disgruntled or apathetic or something. You know, you can solve some of these things. So I want to see us build. And I think Anderol is an example of like we're going to build these things that help us. You know, I want to build those ships. We can build ships in the U.S. I mean, he's an impressive. impressive founder. And so are other people there. We can build chip fabs. You know, you don't necessarily need tiny fingers. It's not a lot of bullshit stories we've been told. We can build chip fabs. We can learn to work. But you get the idea. Like, let's build some cool shit. And I don't know why you wouldn't want to do that. And we could build chips. 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 into 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. You just look for the crazy hair and the Delorean, and that's how you find them. Yeah, I'd say I attract some of them because I've worked on some of the kinds of projects they want to do, and hopefully they believe that I'll at least hang in there long enough to understand what they're trying to do and maybe believe in it and maybe invest in it.

So that's where I'm at. There are times when I find out about a technology or an invention that we might have been really helpful with, but it's too late. That is frustrating. Too late in terms of stage. Meaning, yeah, we're basically helpful at the beginning. You know, we're helpful in the early stages when you've got to get out of that garage or get out of that lab and become more maybe venture compatible. 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 so yeah, I would love to

see these, especially the breakthroughs really early. But I guess is your game to attract them to you or do you go out and search in the dark corners of nerddom? Yeah, but I still need help. I need to deputize my friends. There's probably like VCs hanging out at Starbucks by MIT, but those professors call me when they have something that their postdocs want to spin out. And I'm like, yes, that's the help I need because I can't hang out at every lab. I go and I visit and I try to be helpful. So some of its labs about another third is like rogue engineers who are working at some company that's got their head up their ass and not doing the coolest thing. So I like that.

And then my favorite third is like the crazy hackers who are in a base. basement. You just can't find them. They're not going to TED or whatever. Rodney wasn't going to TED when he was a teenager. Yeah, Rodney's not going to TED. That's right. He spoke at a couple of TED events, I think. Okay. But I mean, when he was like the undiscovered. Oh, yeah, no, 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. I'm all reverse engineering. So when I show up to salsa, what I'm doing is, yeah, there's a teacher and they're showing me a thing I'm supposed to learn. I have to try everything and throw out the stuff that doesn't work. That's literally how I learned to dance. So I'm a really good salsa dancer now, because I started 20 years ago, but a very unorthodox salsa dancer, which, to be fair to my partners, I should say that, because I don't dance like everyone else. And I can't learn to dance like someone else.

I have to try this stuff and then converge on what works. That's a really great thing, but I, you know, so I dance differently than everyone else. But, yeah, salsa for me was very important because partly because too much of my life was hanging out with hackers who fit a demographic that's like a little too homogenous in its way, maybe not intellectually, but certainly by all other metrics. So I had trained in Aikido for like a decade, which is a, 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 always train with a partner. And that's not true for like a lot of martial arts.

You know, I'd done a lot of punching and kicking in the air with karate and stuff before that. And it just didn't land for me. With Aikido, you always have a partner. And so they're attacking you. And without words, you're trying to communicate that you want them to shove their head in the ground or something like that. And I love that. You know, I love that feeling of physical communication. And I'm not great at I keto and I was trying to learn that through reverse engineering as well,

which also has unorthodox problems. But eventually, short version of story, as I figured out that it was an upgrade to train instead of with sweaty old Japanese guys, sweaty young Latin girls. So I'm still basically doing the same thing as I keto, but in salsa. And I can do it any night anywhere in the world. There's salsa dancers. You just got to know where to find them. You don't need to speak the language. And so I got a lot out of dancing salsa. I got a community of people in all walks of life. I'm not a rock star in salsa. I get outranked by the Mexican dishwasher every night. It's good for my ego because I'm at the bottom always. And I think that's good for me. And you learn something. My way of moving through the world is so heavily affected by Aikido and Salinas. Also. So anyway, I've been doing that for a long time. Salsa has a huge advantage over Tango that you can find it anywhere. Tango is pretty narrow. Unless you're in Argentina, in which case, you have an embarrassment of riches. But anywhere else, even in Argentina, outside of the capital, you can find more salsa. Salsa is everywhere. 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 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 Ferriss 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 you? So in salsa, the first like year and a half, you're in class, you're being shown a move, you're learning the move, you're learning the basics, you're learning the timing, learning the steps, learning, you have to do that. There's just no way getting out. It's excruciating for me because I kind of

suck at that. But the day I got through that and what that meant for me was like the day I could get out of anything I could get myself into because in salsa you're like turning a girl into a pretzel and then untying her at like 180 miles an hour. Once I realized, okay, I know how to get out of every possible thing that I can get into. Every failure 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. 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 can feel at all. So that's what happened to me. And that's pretty heterodox, but that's what I meant. We may have more overlap than you realize. Just in the sense that I had when I first got to Argentina in 2004, late 2004, maybe early 2004, I had zero interest in tango, absolutely zero. I, in fact, wanted to avoid it because my reference points were scent of a woman, true lies, flower in the teeth. I'm like, who would ever want to do that? It looks so stiff. I did not have any interest in the choreography. My only dance back at that point was that I had started, co-founded the first hip-hop dance troupe 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 to me, right? 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 Avenida Florida in Buenos Aires, which is a very famous pedestrian area, no cars. And it was hot as balls. I mean, it was just so, it gets very humid and hot. And the only place I could see, I was waiting for a friend to get out of a Spanish class was this tango music shop, total tourist strap, just had all of this cold air.

I could see it, just billowing out, the AC. And so I walked in there and it was just killing time. And this older woman, like middle-aged woman, chain smoking, bleached blonde hair in Spanish was like, hey, asshole. She's like, I know you're not going to buy anything. But if you're going to stick around, you have to at least give me 10 pesos for the class upstairs. And I was like, uh, okay, what's the class?

Tango. I was like, ah, okay, fine. And meanwhile, for the first. month or so there, a half Panamanian, half Argentine friend had convinced me to go to Argentina from Panama because he had said that Argentina has the best red wine in the world, the best steak in the world, the most beautiful women in the world, and you can live there for a king on pennies. And I was like, sold. Let's go. So I found the steak. I found the wine. It was cheap. And I was like, where are all these beautiful women? And then I walked upstairs

to this class. It was like 3 p.m. or something. And it was like, nine smoking hot women and one board-looking guy who was like a husband who had been sent there on assignment. And I was like, oh, okay. And then throughout the course of that class realized, oh, this is all improvised. Now this is interesting. Now this is interesting. And it was actually not for me, Aikido, but wrestling, believe it or not, and judo that helped because it's the same same. I mean, you're shifting weight, you're changing balance. You are directing the motion. of someone else. The only difference is in dance, the person's trying to cooperate instead of choke you out or break your arms or throw you on your head. Yes, sometimes, exactly. I did get

shamed off the dance floor by some old Argentine ladies when I first tried to go out into the wild. I still do. Oh my God. Yeah. It's such a good story. It's a good, very humbling experience. For me, it was 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 leaving 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.

Yeah, it is for people who haven't really been exposed to dance, at the very least, you should go to a tango or salsa dance hall to see good dancers who are strangers dance with one another because if I took you to La Biruta or Niño Bien or one of these Milonga in Argentina during kind of prime time, which would be like 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. I don't know how they get at. The good dancers don't show up until they show up really late. I never go out until midnight. And I could show you a pair dancing and you would say, wow, they must have been practicing and rehearsing this choreography for six months. And I'd say, no, this is the first time they're dancing. 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 dancers salsa is super fast yeah but salsa's a lot well tango can get fast but salsa is like dependably fast Yeah. So, like, very fast music. The steps are fast and there's a lot of spinning and shit. And so I'll close some partner's eyes because I can lead her. Sleep. She doesn't need her eyes because I'm leading everything. I'm tracking every moving object in the room. I'm putting her feet where they go. And so you can sometimes, especially for some dancer, especially if they're up tight, because like a lot of salsa dancers will train for the stage. So they'll train choreography. and all this crap. And I'm trying to get them out of that mindset. So I'll get her eyes closed. And you won't know. She can spin with her eyes closed. And I remember also one of the aspects of my tango immersion, because I went 110%. I just fully committed. I mean, my feet

ended up, I was doing three to six hours a day. Yeah. And my feet ended up so bruised because the shoes are these really thin shoes. They're basically suede slippers. Yeah. 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, La Viduta, I think it's in the basement of like the Armenian consulate, filled with smoke, which I can actually tolerate in that environment. Everyone's sweating. and it's got kind of an illegal speak-easy type of feel. Definitely a fire hazard. Totally. Then there's another one, Sunderland, which was basically in a high school gymnasium

on a basketball court, just blindingly bright lights and a totally different crowd. And by crowd, I mean almost every age you can imagine. I mean, it's like 18 plus, but you would have older ladies, you would have. have 70-year-old guys dressed to the nines in a three-piece suit. I also got screamed off the dance floor by a few of those guys. 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. And so you've got your partner and you step backwards. So male, right foot, back. And in a dance hall, you cannot do that. Why? Because you don't have a bicycle helmet with mirrors on it. You can't see where you're going. So you just end up smashing into people when you do that. So when you go into a live environment in the wild, typically you're going to take that first step out to the side because you can see where you're going with your peripheral vision. So I would get screamed off by the men because I would bump into them. And Argentines are, they're very much like, at least in the capital city, very much like Italians. Like they are a passionate gang of folks, very wild gesticulating, very high volume. And if you bump

into their lady, they're going to give you an earful. With the, women in the beginning, this probably happens in salsa, but in tango at least, if you're always practicing with the same partner, especially if in my case, that woman is a really good dancer, she will develop a sixth sense to read what you are intending her to do, even if your lead or the mark is weak. And then you're like, wow, I'm a Jedi. I'm doing so well. And you go out and you do it with a stranger. And literally I had women say to me, they're like,

they throw their arms down and disgust in the middle of a song, which is quite a show in the tango world, and just be like, I don't know what you're trying to do. I do not know what you're trying to do, how you're trying to move me. Yeah.

And they would just get furious. Yeah. And 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 20 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 L.A. style, West Coast Salsa. Salsa actually comes from New York City. New York City, yeah. I live in the epicenter of salsa, but they dance what's called Mabo. 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 seen the tango world also has its factions so every subculture needs it's infighting yeah exactly so there's definitely a fair amount of that and you know I brought up the the older guys like the 70 year old guys in part because I I remember going to these dance halls, and, you know, I'm a healthy red-blooded male, and I'm looking for the most attractive women to dance with, which was not worth it in the beginning, because I was just going to make an ass to 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 who are 30 or whatever, professional

stage dancers, they want to show off every tool in the toolkit. And it ends up just being a melee. 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 is what matters.

Yeah. And same in salsa and, you know, it's derivatives. Yeah. Yeah. So now, 20 years in, right, you started salsa, it seems, in part to get away from like the homogeneity of the hacker world, but you're still doing it. What do you get out of it? I do it less. I want to. COVID kind of damage the salsa scene. It's mostly back, but I don't have a salsa community anymore. And the problem with that is it takes me a while to sort of brainwash my partners into doing the thing I want to do. you've got to find a certain special kind of partner that can hang in there for that. What I do, because I travel so much and I dance salsa everywhere I go, it's kind of like the first conversation when you meet somebody.

It's like, what do you do? Where do you work? Where did 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. 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. So it's an evolution.

Paulus, we've covered a lot of ground. We could, of course, cover a million other things for another five hours. But is there anything that we haven't touched on that you would like to bring up? Oh, wow. Anything at all. I have a few closing questions as well. 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 because I got early start and then maybe by 2001 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. There may be 10 or 20 years into their career now. And so maybe we can win some of them over and help us come bring these other technologies to life. Like I described, I think the opportunities are bigger. The impact is bigger. And why would you want to do that? Well, I think there's a meaning in it.

There's an opportunity here to see technology as a force for good to make the world better. we build this toolkit that we're going to use to build the future. And you get to add something to that toolkit. So, yeah, I just think if you put that framework to use, you could kind of get a sense of like where technology can go and get a lot more excited about it. It's really sad for me to see people that are pissed off about technology in general or even pissed off about their phones or whatever.

I'm like, yeah, okay, well, what are you using it for? You know, are you just doom scrolling? because we could do a lot better than that. And so I think that's, if I had a chance to, like, try and share something, it would be that, like, there's a lot left to do. 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 say this is a lively environment. I like it. Those people, let's say there are at least a handful listening who resonate with what you just said. Yeah. What should they do? Should they fill out a form on your website? Should they check out anything online related to you? Send you an email? I mean, what would you want those people to do? Yeah, carefully I ask for. Yeah, I'd be careful with the email. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I try to read every email already. I can't reply to all of them. So I don't know the right answer. With or without me, I think these are important things to do. We can take on some fraction of things and help out a little bit. I think that what I'm trying to do is convince, not just those founders, but also those investors, like, hey, you could steer what you're doing

to bigger opportunities. Look at deep tech. Like, you don't have to be a physicist to do it. You could find some important things and some really lucrative things to invest in in deep tech and you won't be competing with all the other usual suspects. I've made that shift largely in my own investing in the last five years. Wow, cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know we can cut this out, but you're an investor in Hullabioam. Yeah. Yeah, that's one that we did. It's super cool.

HoloBiom is amazing. It is. I mean, I think that's going to 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, he's step number one, right? It's coming back to the, it's like, yeah, sure, you can create probiotics with six widely available commercial strains, but ultimately you have thousands. Yeah. What people don't realize is that, well, just to make it clear 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. Mind's different than yours. Everybody's different. We're tuned for different things. And we don't even have a way of understanding that. And so that's microbiome. We're going to learn about it. Every one of those microbes. is probably a few PhDs that need to get done. But HoloBioam is crafting the machinery to do that. Lebecanism, do that.

And it's exciting because they're figuring out cool stuff already. It's a super cool company. Yeah, I've been getting very involved with aquaculture and, like, algae feed additives for cows to reduce methane production, which is frankly very far outside of my comfort zone. I hope to have a positive return on investment, but I tend to get myself sometimes into trouble. For instance, I invested in a company that was developing inhalable insulin. So insulin that you could effectively use an inhaler for. And the tech was super solid, but due to a bunch of regulatory issues and other factors that I have much less familiarity

with, puzzles that I'm not accustomed to solving for. I end up with a lot of zeros when I stray outside of stuff that I can directly promote to my audience, right? Because I can increase the value of equity and a company very clearly if it's an Uber or a blue bottle of coffee or fill in the blank. But nonetheless, I have been as an intrepid, I get it. I get it. I guess deep tech investor because 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. What like most investors would do is get a portfolio, try to get a big enough portfolio to offset

those failures with hits. And that's the shots on goal game. That's why we do so many. That's why we focus on being the first check, doing pre-seed stuff, actual tech. We'll do hundreds of these things, and we're going to hope to get a couple hits. Over the course of a single 10-year fund. In one fund, we'll do about 60. So we'll do another fund and we'll do another 60 in the future. But yeah, we'll do multiple funds. But we're not, most VCs would kind of like graduate from pre-seed to C to Series A. We don't do that. We just stay.

Super early. Lots and lots of pre-seed. Yeah. If you could only place one bet in Fusion, where would you place it? Oh, boy. Don't get me started. Okay, I'm started. Yeah.

Okay, Fusion. Or would your edge of be zero? It's not zero. So here's the thing. So Fusion, as you know, Fusion is like, rattle these molecules and get them to 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 going to heat up these molecules so much that they kind of expand and open up to the possibility of getting stuck together. Just create a miniature sun, no big deal. is temperatures that rival the sun. Because that is what the sun is doing, is doing fusion. But what you need that we don't have on Earth that the sun has is you need a lot of pressure as well. Now, the pressure you could get if you could make a vessel that would hold the plasma,

but the plasma is so hot it'd 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 using the force to do it. So that's a super cool idea, but it has been very difficult to make it work. And scientifically, we didn't even really know if it would work. And that's why people make fun of fusion all the time and say that it's 20 years away and

always will be. That changed. So the cool thing is a few years ago, the team from MIT called Commonwealth Fusion Systems now published a series of, I think, seven papers that explain exactly how they can make magnetic confinement fusion work. And the real breakthrough was a new superconductor. It's a superconductor that allows them to make the world's most powerful magnet, which they 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 togamac, which is like the giant donut shape 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 going to need tritium and there's about enough tritium on Earth left to make it go one time. And the only way to make more tritium is, you guessed it, in a fusion reactor where they've got to get like 99% efficiency on getting the tritium out. And we don't know if that's going to be possible. So there's like just a zillion of these really hard engineering

problems. So anyway, that's a longer. Can't just source the tritium from gun sites? You can source it from the moon. So there are people who want to, to go to the moon and grab tritium and bring it back. The stuff in gun sites is there's very little of it left. It is tritium paint and in your old Swiss watches and things. That's why they glow. You need tritium. But anyway, the point of all this is to say in the best case scenario, fusion is very difficult. I really hope we get it. The upside of that is once it really does work. You'll get more energy out than you put in. So think of like a gas tank. You'll have to fill once and it runs the rest of your life. What is that Q greater than one?

Q greater than one is the metric. Has anyone crossed that? No one has ever actually achieved that if you count the entire energy for the system. There are projects and once in a while you see fusion headlines where it's like, you know, fusion works from Livermore or whatever. And what they've done is on system level one, which basically means the energy going into the fusion from like the 192 giant lasers is less than the energy coming out of the fusion. But they're not counting the energy going into the lasers. And the problem with all this, the reason I'm explaining is so people can understand, a lot of these fusion projects are very expensive to do research on. They figured out it's hard to get that money from academic research financing. They're trying

to co-op venture capital to do it. So I think a lot of these teams are overstating what they can do, how fast they can do it, because they're trying to track that capital. And I think they're being a little disingenuous about it. I'm not going to name names. And the problem with that is it poisons the well for the people who do have something that could work. So you've got to be very careful about whether you think it's going to map to that 10-year venture time horizon. I have seen a lot of the fusion companies. I haven't evaluated all of them. I've not invested in any of the plasma fusion companies. I will tell you, because I am a crazy venture capitalist to invest in wild ideas, I did invest in one.

And it's called nanoconfinement fusion. So these guys have figured out a very simple way to cause fusion by putting deuterium together with carbon nanotubes that cause a fusion. And if it works, it'll be fucking amazing. There is work to do to prove it. Got it working in the lab. But they're working on advancing that now. NASA has done the same kind of fusion using metal lattices.

So this is a very fringe area and fusion. Probably any physicists you know will tell you that Pablo's full of shit, which is fine. But that's the kind of wild ideas that we think are worth pursuing if we can. So there's an important inflection point there where we're able to see this works in the lab. Can we commercialize it as open? Also, as long as you are not completely insane and you have some degree of technical due diligence given the way you're investing, right? If you'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 precede, that's your maximum downside risk, then it's like, okay.

Yeah, so I'm along for that ride. I'm going to get it wrong sometimes. But if that works, the upside is fucking utopia. So we're going to do a few of those. And we have a few. Which, I'm not going to ask you to pick one because I would put you in a tight spot. But could you name one of, I'm sure, quite a few or several from your portfolio that you feel is likely to be a winner? And the reason I'm asking is that I want to know what the characteristics are that give you.

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, because you need that to build a business. And I can only take a few bets where I don't see that, hoping that it's going to come later. It's interesting because you have the opposite problem of a lot of venture capitalists. 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 sympathetic. You know, I have backed founders who I, because I love the tech, but they just, they spent their career on the tech. They're only making a business because it's the next logical step. I mean, the other issue is that if you have someone who's very technical, let's say that they haven't to be a unicorn and they're also really good at business. If they try to spearhead both sides of that coin, they're going to burn out. Totally. I think we have a fucked up mythology in Silicon

Valley. We imagine this amazing, smart person who invented something and then became a patent lawyer and patented it, wrote the code to launch the first version, and then hired the genius team, and then chose an HR policy and took the company public. Like, that is not actually what's going on. It's always teams. And we might have the quarterback out in front that is the focal point that the whole world looks at and says, oh, that's the founder and that's the one that you see on YouTube. But that is a person who is doing an important job of being the human face for a company, but there's a team behind them. And so as a founder, I think you've got to find the people who are good at things you suck at. My founders often suck at

marketing. They suck at business development. And that's okay. You can suck at that. I don't need you to be good at that. I don't believe in personal growth like every other podcast host probably does. 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 want to figure out how do I get them to party with the entrepreneurs and team up? And I don't know how to scale that, but I really want to. Pobbles, where should people find you online? What are the best websites or otherwise? I have deepfuture.com.

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 and nerds and record some of them. And then I'm on all the stuff like, you know, I'm Pablo's on X, but nobody listens to me there. I'm LinkedIn. More people listen. So you could do those things. Oh, I have a really good, I have probably the best email list in the world because the only things I send out are super inspiring and amazing technology so join that or they can find that at the deep future yeah sure yeah that's there there's a WhatsApp group with propaganda and join 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 are pretty jaw-dropping, such as the five out of every $6 associated with shipping going to fuel or whatever the number might be and so on. I mean, it's really remarkable. The statistics are, you know, those are meant to be 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 I came unarmed, so I wouldn't intimidate your sensibility about getting hacked. Yeah, Black Van's still out front, so it ain't over until it's over. And for everybody listening, we will link to all the things we mentioned, including Pablo's website, book, newsletter, etc. At tim.com.

I can guarantee you that Pablo's will be the only Pablo's. So just search Pablo's. That's true. 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. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.com.com slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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