Pablos built one of the first decentralized money networks, the first experimental Blue Origin rockets, one of the first handheld computers, invented 1000s of new patents with Nathan Myhrvold, and most recently launched a deeptech venture firm called Deep Future. And now, on July 12, expect his book: “Deep Future”.
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Pablos Holman and Amol on Deep Future
Amol Sarva: [00:00:00] On today’s episode, I’m excited to have my pal, Pablo Coleman from the future. Are we rolling? We are rolling. Right on. Bob, are we rolling? Bob? And we’re gonna talk about, I don’t know I think we should talk about a little bit of origin story before we get to the fund and the new book that’s coming out.
And I’m excited to be the first interviewer Yeah. That you’ve chosen to speak to
Pablos Holman: about your freshly. Finalized manuscript. We’re gonna turn the tables. I’m gonna have you on my podcast sometime too. Yeah, that’d be great. Apparently you have, we should
Amol Sarva: have done right now, apparently you have hundreds
Pablos Holman: of listeners, I dunno, hundreds or thousands here.
Here. Not hundreds of thousands
Amol Sarva: Here on this podcast we have the two of us who will listen to it be recorded. Hey, I’m
Pablos Holman: cool with that. I once had a radio show in Alaska and we had a full studio and we broadcast. But we had no antenna. The station had no antenna, but we had 24 hour a day broadcasting. So imagine like how esoteric and weird the DJs for a radio station are that have no listeners.
Yeah. Like we had the best [00:01:00] parties.
Amol Sarva: Yeah. Wow. Then I guess let us begin then with the origin stories. Cool. You were born in Alaska? Apparently. I was born in
Pablos Holman: Alaska. Yeah. It’s hard to find an Alaskan who’s escaped from Alaska, but I’m one of ’em, I’ve literally never met anyone who’s from Alaska.
I know. Yeah. They make it about as far as Seattle and then they really feel like they’ve traveled and then they usually go back to Alaska. Very few Alaskans make it this far. So you made it to the great capital of Seattle across the I left Alaska, I went to Silicon Valley and then ended up, yeah, after the.com collapse, I retreated to Seattle.
And but that was good. And Seattle was really good for a long time. Now I’m over it.
Amol Sarva: I, part of part of what’s really cool about that experience, or at least that I quite admire, is you got to work with some of the real. Intellectual rock stars of the tech world. Certainly yeah, in the, I guess it would’ve been the two thousands, roughly.
Yeah.
Pablos Holman: Yeah. After Silicon Valley I went to work I went to Seattle and I started Blue Origin or helped start Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Yeah. [00:02:00] And so that was great for me and an inflection point where I took all of the experience of bringing computer technology to life and trying to use the computers to bring other technologies to life.
And so that’s what. What I think of as deep tech.
Amol Sarva: Yeah. But how’d you even so what was the Silicon Valley tour of duty then that I
Pablos Holman: started out computer hacking when I was a kid. So when I was in Silicon Valley, it was really about trying to, use the, that skillset to bring new technologies.
And, in the late, in the, like late eighties and early nineties, it was really just take computers into every industry for the first time. But then, once we started putting Muggles on the internet in 94, then I realized, oh shit, this is not gonna go very well. We need to secure things.
So I started working on cryptographic protocols, trying to secure the internet. I worked on cryptocurrency in the nineties. Oh. And a precursor, flus or whatever. No, not that good. Flus is not a cryptocurrency. Flus was a. I guess you could say like digital currency, but No, I was [00:03:00] trying, small group of fringe wackos, cipher punks.
Were trying to figure out how do you use cryptography to create protocols that keep the internet free? So I can’t control you, you can’t control me. It’s a level playing field. ’cause we could see that, the centralization would lead to centralized control and therefore, a sort of authoritarian network.
That was the view. And so we thought if we could make decentralized protocols, you could preserve this sort of egalitarian freedom on the internet, and that’s what we were trying to do. No one believed us. It seemed crazy at the time, and it has all happened actually, both directions of it have happened.
It has all massive centralization as well as Yes, exactly right. We did get massive centralization, but we also did prove the decentralization. I think initially the first big success was BitTorrent. But in order to decentralize things. Anything else? Bra by the way, went to my high school. Yeah.
Amol Sarva: Oh, really? One of the legendary,
Pablos Holman: yeah. I’m old buddies of Bram. Wow. Yeah. So bra managed to be, [00:04:00] take the, get the right mix of crypto and usable and everything together at the right kind of moment in time to make a fully decentralized protocol work. And then, but to decentralize anything else, you need a way to pay people to contribute resources to the network.
And that’s why cryptocurrency was a kingpin. And early on we’re trying to solve cryptocurrency and we just could never figure out how to decentralize the mint. And that’s what Bitcoin solved. So the last thing I ever did in crypto was beta test Bitcoin. Wow. There you go.
Amol Sarva: Wow. Okay. So I guess that’s your unique qualification for, and you show up in Seattle to now build a rocket.
Yeah, exactly right.
Pablos Holman: You didn’t, you don’t need me to build a rocket. But what we were trying to do at the beginning of Blue Origin was. Find alternatives to rockets? Are there other ways to go to space? Oh, like a balloon. Yeah. We tried balloons. I, I was out there like loading helium into giant balloons and they’re very unwieldy.
But we did it and then we tried a bunch of other ideas, but the problem, like planes that go really high and [00:05:00] then just like pop right at the end or we had one of the ones we had was actually we didn’t work on this at Blue, but it’s kinda adjacent ’cause we were trying to figure out if you could make a, like a 20 mile high.
Tower. Oh, out of steel elevator. Not an yeah, you’d have an elevator go up the tower and you just lob it into space from the top of that tower.
Amol Sarva: Yeah, that’s, that idea has been around the space elevator. It’s been around,
Pablos Holman: oh space elevator is different. Oh. Like space elevator. You put a, you run a, basically a carbon fiber ribbon into space and you have a tether out in space.
Oh, okay. And that holds it taut. And then you run an elevator up that ribbon. And that one was impossible at the time. We didn’t work on that one, but, ’cause it was too heavy. Because you, you need a glue that’s 99% efficient to make that ribbon, and you need a laser that’s like more powerful than anything that’s ever been built.
What’s the laser for? To beam power to the elevator.
Oh, damn. Because there
Pablos Holman: can’t be any power up there. There could be nuclear up there. No. We don’t have a lot of nuclear power in space. There’s some nuclear batteries, the idea of putting like a fission reactor in space is very scary to people.
So that was also [00:06:00] considered taboo. I see. Yeah. But now. I think we could build the ribbon. One of the, one of the companies I’m working on, we, they make arbitrarily long carbon nanotubes, like ultra long nanotubes, longer than anyone else has been able to produce all the nanotubes. You keep hearing about nanotubes, but the reason nothing ever happens is ’cause all anybody could make is nano tube dust uhhuh, which is mostly useless and certainly for making, structural materials.
Now we can make super long nano tubes and these guys are making. Like rope that has nothing but nanotubes. No binder, nothing. Which is a hundred percent nano tubes, so that we could use that to make the tether. They’re making tapes and honeycomb core stuff, so they make the most high performing materials in human history.
Uhhuh, and eventually, and it’s super cheap to make this stuff.
Really?
Pablos Holman: Yeah. So eventually we’ll make everything outta nanotubes. It’s gonna be cool. Yeah. You
Amol Sarva: make like bridges
Pablos Holman: out. Yeah, we will. Yeah. Rebar and everything will be nanotubes, but hasn’t been possible till now. But anyway. So now space elevator.
And also lasers have come a long way and power beaming has come a long way. So we might actually be at a [00:07:00] point where the space level of everything could work. Yeah.
Amol Sarva: Oh yeah. Okay. So you’re working on that power. Yeah. You’re
Pablos Holman: working on the
Amol Sarva: balloon?
Pablos Holman: We were, yeah. A bunch of ideas and essentially what we eventually learned was nothing technical.
What we learned was that from an economic perspective, you started a $50 billion hole with any technology besides rockets. ’cause Russia and NASA spent so much developing rockets, uhhuh. And we can stand on their shoulders, Uhhuh. So eventually we decided to build a rocket. The first thing we did, but the last thing we did before deciding to build a rocket was test reusability.
Could we make a rocket that could do vertical takeoff and landing? Oh, we built this terrifying craft. Out of four Rolls-Royce, jet engines retooled to mount vertically. And we had to write all our own code for microcontrollers to make it like a act, like a quad coter. Yeah. Yeah. Because now you could buy a quadcopter at [00:08:00] Walmart.
Yeah. But in those days it was hard work. So we built this thing and then we drug it out into Central Washington. Things weighs probably like 30,000 pounds. And then, it takes off. It’s just the noisiest thing ever. It goes up, flies around like a UFO and then comes back and lands where it started and it totally worked.
Wow. And so we’re like, fuck, let’s, now let’s do it with a rocket.
Amol Sarva: Wow. Yeah. So the existence proof of a, like a vertical takeoff landing is where you began because the SpaceX people act yeah. They invented and it came many years
Pablos Holman: after. Look, SpaceX has done an amazing job. The, this was the vision for Blue from that moment on, that was 2004.
Wow. And yeah, so they, the two companies were, managed in wildly different fashion and, end up with on different trajectories. But but yeah, that’s what Blue’s been doing ever since is they started out to develop their own rocket. That, that took ’em a long time.
But they ended up with an amazing rocket. And now they’re, they’ve really turned a corner and they’re starting to, as far as I can tell, really [00:09:00] perform really well, and they’re starting to launch more and it’s very exciting. And they got their big rocket going. Are they
Amol Sarva: like fully in the hunt to have a big share of the launch business in the world?
Is that a, I don’t know.
Pablos Holman: I don’t have anything to do with it anymore. Yeah. But what’s your sense, my sense is that launch as a business is. Not a real business. Oh really? There’s some pent up demand for launch and SpaceX has certainly been filling it Uhhuh, but you have, but the job is to create a market for launch Uhhuh, and to enable everybody else who might wanna do things in space that couldn’t imagine figuring out how to launch to provide that for them, blues.
Origin original vision is really inspired by like the internet. It’s like, all right, it took a lot of government r and d money to invent the internet, and then it took a bunch of, investment to go build it out, especially from governments, by co-opting telecom, then [00:10:00] co-opting cable modems, then being able to justify, putting more infrastructure.
And so the idea with Blue was like, okay, let’s go down that path for space. Let’s figure out how to make a highway to space. And then a whole generation of tech entrepreneurs could start to build things out there. Yeah. And that’s really the, that remains unchanged. That’s the track that they’re on.
And so I don’t, apps on the platform like those remain to be seen. They’ll be invented. There’s lots of, there’s so many cool things you could do, but not if you also have to solve launch. And I just think that’s very important to understand. And but it’s great that, SpaceX is also.
Really charge forward and made that possible. Launch cost for an iPad to go to space in a space shuttle would’ve been $40,000 launch cost for an iPad to launch one kilogram. Oh, was what was $40,000? Yeah. Per kilogram. Now it’s 1500 ’cause of SpaceX. And the target for Starship, their big rocket is [00:11:00] 10.
Dollars. Yeah. Per kilogram. Yeah. It’ll be cheaper to store your old like sports ball equipment in space than in your garage like this decade. That’s what’s happening and people just can’t get their heads around that cost curve. But it’s enabling so much possibility, Uhhuh. And that’s why it is so exciting to be able to see that we’re, in our lifetime, we’re gonna be able to do all these things in space that were just science fiction.
Yeah.
Amol Sarva: I guess I had a sense that it was getting a lot cheaper. I would’ve guesstimated a hundred bucks per kilogram or something. But you’re saying we’re a hundred would, even if we only get to a hundred, that would be amazing. Yeah, it’s quite amazing. And it also depends on what your kilogram is.
Obviously you’re not sending like a golf, bunch of golf balls up there. You’re gonna sell it and send out little micro satellites, computational devices, whatever. They’re gonna be able to do amazing stuff. Maybe they’ll even be a local network up there, like they don’t even need to reach back to earth.
Yep. People are working on that communications. Yeah. Yep. So that was 2004. The the existence, proof of the takeoff and [00:12:00] landing. And so how long did you stick with Blue Origin?
Pablos Holman: No, I left after that ’cause
Amol Sarva: ah,
Pablos Holman: yeah, once you’re you don’t need me to build a rocket.
Amol Sarva: Oh, I see. You were doing like the prospective like science and engineering to choose a path.
Pablos Holman: Yeah. If you, at that point. Blue started hiring, grownups who’ve built rockets before. Oh, I see. And you want me around if you’re doing something new and crazy, but if you’re doing something that’s been done before, you don’t really, anyway, so I started, I had another project I really wanted to do at the time, which was miniaturized computers and my friends had started this company in San Francisco to.
Take a laptop, which at the time, like one laptop per child kind of No, it it was called OQO and we were
Amol Sarva: taking, oh, I remember this one. Yeah, you do. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was in the smartphone wars myself, oh yeah. I started a smartphone in 2007. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Pablos Holman: Good timing. Yeah, so starting in 2000, about [00:13:00] 2000.
So these guys had made the first titanium power book crap. Oh, so the ancestor of your MacBook, and it was the first like cool, sleek laptop laptops in those days were like aircraft carriers with like dual VHS decks. There was massive. And so these guys had made the first like one inch thick laptop, which at the time seemed miraculous.
What they wanted to do is shrink that down. Fit in your pocket.
Amol Sarva: Yeah.
Pablos Holman: And we, they couldn’t get Steve Jobs to go for it. So they. Spun out, made their own company to make a Windows machine and shrunk down the hardware to the size of your passport, one inch thick, but it ran a full version of Windows.
Had a five inch touch screen, higher drive, wifi, Bluetooth, everything your laptop had, but it fit in your pocket. And it had a thumb board on it, like a Blackberry. And I used it as my only computer for years. And then at your desk, you’d just like dock into a big screen and keyboard, mouse, you’re good to [00:14:00] go.
Yeah. Docks people would forget about docks. Like there would’ve been a connector that’s like a non-standard connector, but you
Amol Sarva: set it in the dock and it has all the other ports and you, there you go. Other keyboards. Yeah.
Pablos Holman: This was palm pilot days, right? Old fogies, or remember the thing was the size of a palm pilot, but it was full desktop.
So it was the most miraculous consumer computer at the time. Anyway, I was interested in that ’cause I’m more of a computer nerd than a space nerd. Anyway. And we got that going, shipped it, but it ended up just being like a little too cool, too expensive, a little too new, and difficult to get in, find a place in the market, yeah. There was a
Amol Sarva: generation of companies that I admired and that’s one of ’em. Yeah. I liked all the handspring stuff. I liked Palm. Yeah. HP had a pretty cool flip open machine that they attempted to miniaturize even though it was still a little old Fogeyish danger The Sidekick.
Was a cool one. Love a five KI think there may be one other, one or two others that deserve reverence and respect for their early efforts from Totally.
Pablos Holman: And company ended up not really thriving, but a lot of that technology is what [00:15:00] made your iPhone and Android phone conceivable.
Amol Sarva: It was even conceivable because of it.
Yeah.
Pablos Holman: Yeah. Some of that tech is in your iPhone. So anyway, that’s what I was doing and then and then in 2007 that’s when I went to work for Nathan Bol. That’s
Amol Sarva: the thing that you and me up end up talking about a lot. And I want to talk about it a little bit here. ’cause I just think that is one of the cool.
Most outfits
Pablos Holman: that ever existed. It was in its way. Yeah. And I think a lot of people miss that, but Yeah. But we, Nathan wanted to start a lab and do inventions,
Amol Sarva: former CT of Microsoft. Former, like physics professor from Princeton. He had started a company, Microsoft bought it. He was like the Godlike CTO during the nineties that charted the course to, their greatness.
Pablos Holman: Yeah, that’s fair. Also started Microsoft Research, which for a long time. It was probably the most well endowed private research group. But yeah, Nathan had left, Microsoft started Intellectual ventures and [00:16:00] then, when you wanna start a lab, it’s like who does crazy invention labs, call them.
I ended up in that a somewhat different
Amol Sarva: approach than maybe like Bell Labs or something. So it wasn’t as focused or even Microsoft research on fundamental discovery oriented work. It
Pablos Holman: was. Invention and it’s very, I think it’s very distinct, if you’re in a, especially like university type of research environment, your job is basic research, like how does the world work?
That’s what scientific research is largely about. And then like at the other end of the spectrum, you have like entrepreneurs like go make businesses out of this new technology. But the part in the middle is invention. That’s where you take the output from scientific research and map it to solving problems.
And I think entrepreneurs would say that they especially in certain sub-disciplines, like we were talking about space. Yeah. Or maybe we talking about bio I think entrepreneurs would say that product kind of resembles that. But there is a [00:17:00] distinction and maybe that’s what you would maybe emphasize that a little bit.
Amol Sarva: What Yeah. I
Pablos Holman: think there is a big distinction because the. The job of an inventor is to do it the very first time, and that’s really hard. It’s really make a thing for the first time somebody make something happen. The really first, for the very first time, uhhuh and like an artist. You once know once in a generation, whatever, you get your Jimi Hendrix, you get your John Cage, you get your whatever it is, you get your Bjork. But you don’t, that’s everybody. After that, it’s easy. They can just copy that. But doing it the very first time is so underappreciated and so under poorly.
Understood. And it’s, that’s what inventors do. They figure out something that’s possible for the very first time. And that is what expands the toolkit for humanity. So a thing like a handheld computer, there’d be somebody who.
Amol Sarva: [00:18:00] Invented
Pablos Holman: that. So for example, I think that a lot of times we lose it because we’re looking too big.
Like who? Yeah. So for example, in the handheld computer we made we invented so we did something that had never been done before we emulated. So in a laptop, especially in those days, you had a whole pile of chips. One to control the keyboard, one to control the screen, one to control audio, one to control the network.
One all you had nine or 10 Asics, custom chips. To control different hardware elements. It’s part of what made a laptop big. It’s part of what ate a lot of power. So we wrote code to emulate all those chips on a microcontroller. So we got rid of nine chips, replace ’em with one chip, and that’s how part of how we could shrink it down.
So that’s invented. That’d never been done before. Everybody does that now. Every computer is like that now, but we did the first one. You would look at it now and go, ah, that’s obvious. Anybody could do that. Of course that makes sense. So you don’t think of it as an invention anymore. It’s only an invention for that moment in time.
When it [00:19:00] goes from having never been done to having been done the first time, then it’s an invention after that it’s fucking product.
Amol Sarva: Yeah. And when you and when you introduce it to people, what’s that like? Because I think there’s another, that’s another aspect of it. Like when you show someone an invention, it’s different from showing someone a product.
Pablos Holman: Yeah. What’s it like? It’s I think I, in oddly, I guess I’m in the spot of doing that a lot. And ’cause that’s the sweet spot where I like to live. I like to live at that intersection of just came from never being done, never having been imagined, never being possible to nowadays.
And then there’s this super messy process of trying to convince the world that like, Hey, look, this new thing is better. Like everything humans have ever done is obsolete. We now have a way that’s 10 times better, a hundred times better, a thousand times better, and we should do it this way. And so then you have the very messy process of like, how do you embody it in a product?
How do you put that product in a startup? How do you make that into a business? How do you scale it up and make it a. Going concern a corporation, [00:20:00] a multinational conglomerate, like that’s all, we’re actually really good at all that stuff. But all of it, all that machinery of startups and venture capital and business, actually, it’s very good.
We, it’s highly developed. We have investment models for everything but the, but we’ve in over-indexed on it. So if you look at typical entrepreneurs, even tech entrepreneurs. They haven’t invented Jack shit. They’re making a product outta the best thing they could invent, which might be like an iPhone app to have a taxi show up, like cool invention dude, iPhone app to have an air mattress, like whatever.
That’s cool. Might be a great product, but there’s no invention, there’s no technology. And we love those guys so much. We throw money at them, we support them. But imagine if you took like Travis from Uber and you gave him. A nuclear reactor, like you gave him a superpower. You gave him a, something that could save lives, that could make the world actually better.
That’s what we need. [00:21:00] So what I’m trying to do is figure out how you bridge that. Like how do we arm this generation of extraordinary entrepreneurs with actual technology? ’cause the force multiplier comes from the tech every time.
Amol Sarva: So invention, we’re gonna come to your fund in a second and we’ll hear about, how all this is applied now. But that process of invention, a few times when we’ve been together, I told you some of my favorite inventions that I heard about from, oh yeah. From you guys at iv. I like the there was some kind of sneaker, sole inspired by the mosquitoes foot.
Oh. And that was a bit esoteric. I don’t know if you guys actually shift anything but the the famous one, now the fullness of time is like very talked about is, reversing climate change by introducing or reversing temperature gain from CO2 by introducing basically solar gain blocking compounds to the air.
Just like pumping, basically yeah. Solar, geoengineering. Yeah. Geoengineering essentially. Yeah.
Pablos Holman: That’s one of your favorite ones. Just to make it clear to the audience what that’s about. There’s [00:22:00] a, the idea is that we’re emitting all these greenhouse gases, which people think of as greenhouse gases because they make the earth warm like a greenhouse.
But most people don’t realize you actually pump CO2 into a greenhouse.
Oh,
Pablos Holman: yeah. Plants don’t grow out of the ground. Uhhuh, they grow down from the sky. Because they need CO2. Yeah they collect CO2 from the sky. That’s where the leaves come from. It’s wild to think about, but you actually need CO2. Oh.
Like they don’t
Amol Sarva: suck dirt out of the ground and turn it into leaves. They just, they take, not really, no. They take, I, they get other minerals floating in the air and they combine them into leaves. Leaves are
Pablos Holman: mostly carbon. Isn’t that wild?
Amol Sarva: Uhhuh
Pablos Holman: and. Like forests are growing at an all time higher rate right now because we’ve thrown so much CO2 into their atmosphere.
Yeah. So look, I’m not trying to make any political statement. We can stop that, [00:23:00] but there’s a there are countervailing forces as there are countervailing forces that are hardly ever acknowledged. Yeah. And so anyway, yeah, we’re loading up the atmosphere with extra greenhouse gases. Environment’s warming up faster, we believe, and if that keeps going, it’s this runaway effect. It’s the kind of thing where like you load it up, you load it up, and then like it heats up slowly, it heats up slowly. Then all of a sudden there’s no turning back.
Amol Sarva: That’s because other stuff happens that accelerates it, right?
Like when you start melting the white ice on the top and bottom of the earth and that’s becomes a darker color, now you’re gaining more stuff. And then when the ocean gets a little bit higher and
Pablos Holman: yep. There’s a lot of these kinds of things. And so we expect that, we’re all terrified or been, certainly conditioned to be terrified that one of these things is gonna get outta control at any moment.
So the right answer to solve climate change, solve global warming is primarily that you just have to solve energy. [00:24:00] You have to make. Clean, cheap energy at scale, stop burning shit at this massive scale and releasing the CO2 into the environment. But that takes some time. It’s gonna take some time, so it might take a lot of time.
And so to buy some time, if you think that, that things are gonna go south sooner than later to buy some time. There’s a very simple solution, which is you could think of as like sunglasses for earth. Oh, that’s a nice way to put sunglasses for, and there’s different ways you could do it, but the one we worked on a lot of the ideas at the time, this is almost 20 years ago now but at the time, all the ideas for how you do that were like trillions of dollars and completely empath oh, put some fabric above all around the earth. Yeah. Who knows? It just insane ideas. So we’re like what if we came up with some cheap ideas? So our idea was like, okay. There’s a natural phenomenon that creates sunglasses for earth, which is [00:25:00] volcanoes. So if a volcano erupts, occasionally, not always, but occasionally, it’ll shove enough sulfur dioxide high enough into the atmosphere that it’ll float around for a year.
And that’s just little tiny white particles of sulfur oxide. It and they reflect. Oh, and they don’t even look so bad. It’s not black. You can’t see it. No, they don’t look that bad. You can’t see it. It’s too diffused, like it’s completely invisible to humans, but it reflects like 1% of sunlight. That’s called albedo in the stratosphere.
Yeah. Yeah. Albedo is the reflectivity. And then the light sunlight would reflect in the high up in the atmosphere before it got into. The lower atmosphere and was able to heat up these greenhouse. And it happens
Amol Sarva: regularly. Yeah, the famous the most famous volcanic eruptions in the world had periods of cold afterwards.
Like Krato 1812, like Mayor Elli is on the, there you go. Geneva. It’s like snowing in there. You summertime in Switzerland. Exactly right. She writes Frankenstein. That’s one.
Pablos Holman: And we saw this very clearly in the most instrumented e [00:26:00] example in 1992. Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Yeah. And so that one really showed us, oh wow, this actually totally worked.
So what if you could simulate that without a volcano erupting? Our idea was essentially like a garden hose. With helium balloons to the Strat figure to hang it. Yeah. Yeah.
Amol Sarva: So you just have this garden host, so you borrowed some of your designs from the Blue Origin Project. There you go.
Pablos Holman: It was even better.
And then I’m like really balloons, guys. I’ve tried that. It’s a pain in the ass, but other people have figured out how to do balloons better than me. And the idea was you just pump sulfur dioxide up, aerosolize it. One hose in the Northern Hemisphere could. Reverse arctic ice conditions to pre-industrial
Amol Sarva: levels one hose.
How big is this hose? Two inch diameter. A two inch diameter hose. Just going all day, all night. Give it enough time because a volcano happens fast. Yeah, this the volume’s a lot, but it’s
Pablos Holman: it doesn’t take much of this stuff. It’s like not that hard. [00:27:00] And you do need to get it up real high, like you was released above 12 miles up, basically.
So it’s pretty high. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and once it’s up there, it stays for a year or two and eventually rain out. No, you just ose it again, it sounds cheap to do as you a garden hose. Yeah. So you could basically reverse the effects of global warming, like 140 years Of industrialization.
Yeah. You could reverse for like tens of millions of dollars. Yeah. Wow. So all this stuff we’re wound up about.
Amol Sarva: Everything we’re talking about. Yeah. The trillions of dollars of restructuring the entire, like modern economy. Yeah. And instead it’s I don’t even think it’s risky ’cause it happens all the time from volcanoes.
Yeah. But it, it does, it is a source of fear, and it’s a source of fear. And so people are terrified and it’s just game over because of that fear. The other topic, and we’re gonna come to it soon and maybe we should just speed up a little bit to get to the fund, is nuclear, I was in Japan and like they used to be the world leader in nuclear.
And, in fact, they’re an energy. Saudi Arabia, if you look at it from the perspective of their ability to generate and run and operate nuclear, especially if you could turn wow [00:28:00] nuclear into something you can transport, because historically over electric lines, you can’t get from Japan anywhere that matters.
But you can create green hydrogen in your fancy new nuclear plants and you could be exporting more energy than we pump in the United States out of the ground. The Japanese could be that. Yep, and they have, whatever. They have four people die from Fukushima. It was just like real scary, but.
Whatever. And they literally could be a Saudi scale, a quarter of energy if they simply embrace nuclear. And it is one of the themes you think about. It’s even better
Pablos Holman: than that. Like I think what happens is that humans are just these story powered creatures and we get a story in our head and it controls you, controls your behavior and your decision making.
And humanity essentially got this mushroom cloud story in our head when we were kids. And when that happens, it just takes generations to recover. We conflated nuclear reactors with nuclear bomb. Yeah. And we outlawed the wrong one. And if you, if we had [00:29:00] done it the other way around, you never would have heard of global warming.
Totally. Yeah. If we had accelerated nuclear adoption. Yeah. Yeah. We are living on the wrong fork in history. Yeah. We’re still not being honest with ourselves about that. And this is the fundamental issue, but what’s cool and exciting is my kid thinks Chernobyl is a TV show for old people.
This generation is growing up in a world where, as far as they’re concerned, all of our fears about, they don’t have the Cold War in mind. They don’t have the same perspective and Oh, even about like nuclear and mushroom. Yeah. So the story, the story problem can sometimes only be fixed by waiting it out generations.
Science. But now we’re, but now we’re getting there. Science advances. Yeah. One funeral at a time. Yeah. For the last almost 20 years I’ve been, trying to beat people over the head about how cool nuclear reactors are. And there are mostly Palos is crazy. Good luck with that. But like the last year.
Amol Sarva: Everyone’s
Pablos Holman: down.
Amol Sarva: I can’t even freak people [00:30:00] out. We had dinner. We had dinner with the director, Oliver Stone, who made that film now. Yeah. And I, I assume you saw it, right? Yeah, I did. Yeah. And do you buy his argument that it’s I don’t know about conspiracy theory, but there are dark forces behind the o, like the crisscross of the wires there, like oil and gas was, hiring people to turn fears about war into fears, about nuclear energy, about that?
I think it’s entirely
Pablos Holman: possible. I don’t have any proof of that. But here’s the thing. In our lifetime. Who do you think staffed Congress. Probably shell probably Chevron. Yeah. Probably the one biggest industry in the world. Now biggest industry in the world is not oil. Yeah. Tech hyperscalers.
They have learned it’s their job to staff Congress. So we are gonna get nuclear reactors to power all the chips they bought from Nvidia. Yeah. So that is one of the, that if nothing else take heart. That is the force that will make it possible for us to build nutrition. Sure, yeah. I mean it’s it’s, it would be funny if it wasn’t sad, but it is completely true that ironically yeah, [00:31:00] it might be meta
Amol Sarva: that
Pablos Holman: saves
Amol Sarva: humanity.
So let’s talk about future a little bit. How long ago did you start it? We’re gonna have to skip some period of time from where we were to where we are now. Okay. I guess a couple years ago you launched. Yeah. So we started the
Pablos Holman: fund in I guess like technically we’re a 2022 fund. Is that right?
And. But this is a very unusual venture fund, right? We just invest in mad scientists, crazy hackers, people who’ve invented new superpowers. And and so we’re 26 deals in probably almost half deployed with this fund. And we’ll just keep going. We do a lot of ’em. We are usually the first investor for.
For the, these kind of folks, what’s the
Amol Sarva: typical check size that you’ve been doing? A couple hundred grand. Yeah. And you’re like literally the first check. And then do they, how much do they raise in, in each of those? Like finances?
Pablos Holman: Yeah. A lot of times it’s the first round. So they’re doing like a pre-seed round, raising a million or two and at that inflection point where they’re coming out of the lab or [00:32:00] coming outta the garage, they’ve got something.
It’s not a research project they’ve shown it works. But now it’s time to get on a commercial track and so we invest and that’s a, that’s
Amol Sarva: a gutsy, first of all, it’s a gutsy place to be. It’s also a gutsy dollar amount to be doing. Yeah. There are other practitioners of the venture craft who will do these I, many people call these like moonshot projects, yeah. And there may not be a fair name either, like these very like tough technology projects and. Those dudes will put $50 million in the company to ensure it has Yeah. Enough shots on goal to get somewhere. And you’re gonna show up with a few hundred, which they could run out of in like one experiment.
Pablos Holman: Were you not usually the only investor, right? We’re often the first investor, but we’re not always, but they’re usually raising around. But I think a big difference is that, most of venture capital is finance people. Some defected software people, but. And they like technology maybe, but in their, their heart of [00:33:00] hearts, they’re a spreadsheet jockey and they need to see numbers that they can work with and or
Amol Sarva: rather, I’m not one of those people, at least I don’t think I am, but I understand about how this game works, that you need to understand them also.
Yeah. And I think the other side of it though is when you’re deciding what you’re gonna bet on. You gotta at least understand what the bet
Pablos Holman: is. That’s right. Yeah. And if you can evaluate the bet in a spreadsheet, then you’re in a sort of comfortable zone, you could say, for lots of the people who work in investment in general.
Yeah. Yeah. I’m not doing that. I’ve got like wires sticking out a metal, maybe a GitHub, some k provisional patent. I’m dealing with a different stage of the life cycle of a technology and. And it, for me, that’s native, that’s comfortable. I’m cool there. We got 6,000 patents at my lab, all deep tech in every kind of thing.
So I was able to not, I’m not starting at zero on everything. I’m not [00:34:00] saying I know everything, but I’m comfortable with the new technologies in a way that you wouldn’t really expect from a typical venture fund manager. So that’s okay. They, those people are very important. What I’m trying to do is shape these things up so we can deliver them.
To the venture community that is yeah. Built for that. And do you lean towards
Amol Sarva: invention situations where there is no precedent for the, imagined
Pablos Holman: product? Yeah, when I, I think if you look at Fortune 500 companies, they have engineers whose job is to make it like one or 2% better.
I would not do that. I kick in when it’s 10 times better. If I’ve got something 10 times better than state of the art. That then I’m interested. And then I’ll go figure out, is this technology real that’s important? Could it be done on a venture time horizon? That’s also very important.
Could it be cost effective? Could it be cost competitive? If I can convince myself roughly that all those things are possible. Then I can invest and we can try and get this thing shaped [00:35:00] up to where the rest of the world. Okay. Those
Amol Sarva: could, it be questions I think are great questions. Doesn’t need too much money to prove something.
Yeah. Doesn’t need too much time to prove something. It is at least possible that they will accomplish proving something. But what’s the probability that you’re after when you’re hunting for this? I’ll just mention that in. You know what we do at Life X is adjacent to what people do in biotech.
There’s all these people who invest in drugs. Okay. We don’t invest any drugs, we just invest in software companies. But the people invest software that for designing drugs? Yeah. Like that or, yeah. If we invest in like software, ai, whatever. Okay. Where a scientist might use it. Yeah. Or a doctor might use it.
Okay, cool. So that’s just one way to characterize our area. But the scientist who’s using it, okay, maybe they work in a big drug company and maybe they want to make a drug. I don’t know. But the folks who do invest in drugs, they have these tables because there’s just so many reps on this. Every time you wanna invest, invent, invest in a drug, you put all the reps together and it’s like when it’s a nature paper and two PhDs, you’ve got a 2% chance of success.
Yeah. When it’s like working in vitro, it’s 5% chance of success. When you got out of the [00:36:00] mice, it’s 10% chance and it’s just like a very reliable pattern. I wonder, interesting how you guesstimate probability
Pablos Holman: of success. Here’s how I think about it. In a typical venture fund rule of thumb is I’m gonna put, I’m gonna invest in 10 companies, half of ’em are gonna go to shit.
A few of ’em are gonna be a one x return. One of ’em is gonna pay for all failures. That’s the business, that’s the power law business model. In my lab, we’d invent, we’d get, we’d file patents on a thousand inventions and hope we could get one to pay for all failures. Oh, intense power law. Intense power law.
So now I’m in a comparatively conservative venture fund where I invest in a hundred companies and one of ’em is gonna pay for all the s. That’s just, you have to be honest about that. So my job is to make sure every one of these could be that company that’s crazy enough that it could be a hundred times, a thousand times. I’m getting, I’m going for that. That one company that pays for 99 things I fucked up on. And that’s [00:37:00] okay. You know the power law is totally fine if you play at the right scale. If you are in the, this is the problem. That’s why you do a lot of deals. It’s the problem for inventors.
If you’ve got, you got your life, you got crazy hair, you got DeLorean in the garage, and you’re gonna get three shots on goal. A year at the best, right? Yeah, exactly. Like your life one invention, your life as a portfolio, your life is a p is less diversified. You. That’s why it’s, there’s just it’s just tragedy upon tragedy for inventors, right?
Nicola Tesla is wildly fucking successful by comparison, right? To most inventors. And this is why the contrast with Edison is such a big deal. ’cause Edison figured out how to get those shots on gold. Make hits. Yeah. And I think it’s just very important to just understand the game you’re playing.
Most people like venture investors, I don’t know that they all understand the game they’re playing, but they inherited a game that’s tuned and but when we do, we’re doing the Intellectual Ventures lab that, that looks psychedelic to [00:38:00] everyone on earth. A batting average of one.
But that’s what Nathan could see was that, oh, at a large enough scale, it’s no problem. And we worked. So I think that you have to just understand where you’re at. So I’m doing something unique in venture. It might be more like angel investors do something like this if they’re good. The problem with angel investors is if you’re like, oh, I got an exit.
I get to invest in some stuff. I’ll sprinkle some money around, and they get five or 10 or 20 deals. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. Yeah.
Amol Sarva: I have the same conversation with LPs all the time. Yeah. Like a lot of folks who end up investing in our fund, they have dabbled, especially like CEOs, yeah. Successful entrepreneurs. They will have dabbled in angel investing. And there’s sort of two ways it can go. If in your first five deals you had a hit by whatever good fortune, you keep going. And now you start having the portfolio effect and things even start getting better. If in your first five deals you crashed and burned, a lot of times people just quit and they’re like, I’m not a good investor.
I hear that very often from incredibly talented entrepreneurs and ceo. And then, it’s just ’cause you did five. Yeah. Like any [00:39:00] random five, you pick the odds. It’s just random. Like you, you may not succeed. Our first five deals are good, but probably not our best. Do you want to tout one or two deals from the fund and then we should spend Oh, a few minutes on the book?
Like what’s I guess I could tell you about my life sciences deals. I did three.
Pablos Holman: Oh I know all therapeutics, which I think is an impress. Oh, all. And I think that guy’s amazing. Allen’s a good one. Yeah, we don’t have to do that. What else is interesting? I know I invested.
In a company called Hilo last week on the 19th of March. Of April, sorry. No, March. March 19th. Okay. And they’ve invented they’ve got this alternative to smelting for purifying or, processing metals. Okay. So like copper. These are very important. You would not know electronics exist without copper, but in order to save the world, the United States has outlawed building smelting operations in the US because they use too much energy and [00:40:00] pollute a lot.
Exactly. So what we do to save the world is we ship mining, we ship the metals to some other country. They burn the shit out of it. That’s what a smelter does. That’s today’s situation. To purify it and then ship it back. That’s today’s situation. That’s today’s situation. So we have not solved a problem.
We’ve just moved it offshore and this turns out to be how we get to take the moral high ground. Okay. Anyway, that’s not really solved. Seems like a bad idea. Bad idea. So high low has a alternative to smelting. It’s called molt and sulfide electrolysis. This is a, this has never been developed before.
So chemicals plus energy produce the same result as huge amount of energy.
Amol Sarva: Zero emissions. Or is it not even electrolysis? It’s like a synthetic, it’s not, it’s a chemical process.
Pablos Holman: Yeah.
Amol Sarva: It’s a electrochemical process. Oh, it’s electro and
Pablos Holman: it, but
Amol Sarva: you
Pablos Holman: do
Amol Sarva: need
Pablos Holman: some electricity. Yeah. And, but you can get the electricity from solar farms or something.
Okay. Doesn’t, and that ideally you would do that. If you’re burning coal to get the electricity, okay, that’s probably okay. But you use [00:41:00] less. Less. Yeah. And so they can do zero emissions and there’s no regulatory hurdle to do it. You’re allowed to do this in the us And so we closed that deal on the 19th.
On the 20th, Trump signed an executive order to free up mining in the us. Okay? Yeah. So this is very important. The US has all the metals we could need for centuries. We’re just not allowed to mine ’em. And this is why we’re engaged in all these geopolitical machinations to try and get them from other countries.
You hear the press that China has all the rare earth metals and we have to do a deal with Ukraine to get their rare earth metals and all this kinda crap. It’s actually no, we don’t need to do any of that. We need to just mine it here. But do it in a way, and this is what I think people are get, like a lot of our approach to saving the world is getting off course what we should do, ’cause we’re fucking rich is.
Develop the best way, right? Develop a clean way, show the world how to do it cleaner, cheaper, more profitably, and then export [00:42:00] technology. We are stuck in the ban it. Yeah. We’re in the ban it mode and ban. It doesn’t solve the problem ban. It just moves it offshore. Yeah. So we need to embrace it, do it better, and set an example for the rest of the world.
So high low is probably, a fifth of the cost of smelting and it’s, it can be done domestically.
Amol Sarva: Very cool company. All right, now we
Pablos Holman: gotta
Amol Sarva: talk for a few minutes about the book. Oh yeah. So I got, you wrote a book. You seem under duress. You seem like a highly attention deficit kind of guy.
I’m pretty good. Maybe I haven’t, maybe I haven’t seen you like, borrow down deep into an engineering problem, but I would not have guessed from all the time that we spent together that you managed to sit and bang out 50,000 words on any minute. I did it on airplanes. I’m flying around anyway. Can the shit internet on a plane?
Pablos Holman: So I just wrote and, but it was fun to write, like I wrote a book. About the things I know about that I’m interested in, that I would and how did you
Amol Sarva: structure it? Is it like, yeah. What’s the future? Hello? I’m a futurist. No, I just, I
Pablos Holman: 10 themes
Amol Sarva: that will
Pablos Holman: define our century. I thought so. I thought, okay, what if I could write like the [00:43:00] zero to one of Deep Tech?
Like here’s how we’re gonna make these things come to life. And it’s definitely not that book but. But I did try to explain like, here’s how we invest in these things. Here’s how to figure out if they’re possible, here’s how we make them work. So that’s in the book. I wanted it to be accessible, so I also thought, what if it could be like Freakonomics of deep tech?
Oh, and so that’s, it’s also another
Amol Sarva: like some curious and interesting stories and characters. Then there’s,
Pablos Holman: I’m the, yes, for sure. It’s not just me. I’m one of the curious characters, but there’s. Some real curious characters. Who are my friends that are in there? Somebody adventures.
Amol Sarva: Oh, so’s an element of Anthony Bourdain traveling the world.
Oh, maybe,
Pablos Holman: yeah. It could be Anthony Bourdain of Deep Tech. Yeah, it could. Yeah. There you go. And then you get to see through my eyes, like what ’cause I get to go these places and see these labs and learn about these technologies. So I’m trying to demystify them, help people see what I see.
And it can [00:44:00] help give you a sense of hopefulness, these are problems. I explain the problems, I explain the technology that might help us solve them. And you don’t need a PhD to read it. My mom likes this book. And she, but she likes everything you do. Your mom will too.
I don’t know. She have no idea what I do, but she likes the book. So when does the book come out? Who’s publishing it? Forbes publishes the book July 22nd. Can we pre-order it or can pre-order it on Amazon right now, which is very helpful. Ah, okay. I’m there. Yeah. I’m, thank you. If you buy it, it would be a best sell.
Amol Sarva: Maybe we could do a book party. I want to. Let’s do ’em all around the world. I assume you’re gonna do ’em, right? You’re gonna, every chance I get. Let’s do it.
Pablos Holman: Okay.
Amol Sarva: We can start now. Yeah, that’d be cool. That’d be cool. Amazing. Pablos, thank you for coming and being part of this thing. Oh man. I think that this is gonna be my best episode ever.
Thanks. Don’t tell anybody. I didn’t say that. Awesome. But it’s such interesting stuff that you work on and it obviously, we could have gone for five more hours. Yeah, we’ll do that sometime. Yeah. On my podcast. Yeah. All right. Cool. All. Cool. And then I’ll use your [00:45:00] like editor tool. Try it. I’m psyched about it.
Your face is matching your faces. Alright.
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