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

Pablos Holman is a hacker and inventor and the author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Future-Creating-Technology-Matters/dp/B0F23CLXZP/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab https://www.intellectualventures.com/what-we-do/iv-lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs. Pablos also hosts the Deep Future Podcast https://deepfuture.tech/podcast-index/ and is managing partner at Deep Future https://deepfuture.tech/. This episode is brought to you by: Cresset https://cressetcapital.com/tim prestigious family office for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs: https://cressetcapital.com/tim Maui Nui Venison​ https://mauinuivenison.com/lp/tim, delicious, nutrient-dense, and responsible red meat: https://mauinuivenison.com/lp/tim AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start.[00:02:12] The first time I witnessed Pablos’ digital sleight of hand.[00:04:33] How did Pablos become what he considers to be a hacker?[00:08:04] The off-label mindset that makes a good hacker (like Samy Kamkar) great.[00:17:07] The magic of Rodney Mullen.[00:20:28] How Eric Johanson and Pablos gave life to adorable password thief Hackerbot.[00:23:44] Hacker self-defense and the zero-click exploit market.[00:27:11] International pockets of hacker density.[00:30:13] Conventions where modern hackers congregate.[00:30:48] Why, in geopolitics, technology is a game lost by the non-players.[00:33:05] The case to rally behind new nuclear power.[00:36:54] Sequencing priorities so the US can remain technologically competitive.[00:44:49] Evaluating risk and reward in deep tech investment.[00:50:40] Shoring up the shape of shipping.[00:56:59] How Pablos gained his name and famous frames.[00:58:48] Pablos is a possible-ist.[00:59:45] What makes Pablos an attractive hire for the world’s richest people?[01:02:06] From Silicon Valley to Seattle: the Blue Origin origin story.[01:08:55] Why Pablos prevails over his M-dash peers.[01:11:41] Zero Effect and WarGames: The only movies that matter?[01:15:58] A major security malfunction exploited by Major Malfunction.[01:18:30] The enigmatic Neal Stephenson.[01:19:38] Long-form lessons gleaned from Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin mission.[01:27:15] For solving the world’s problems, communities are crucial.[01:31:03] Newlab PSYOPS.[01:34:44] AI and the ripple effects of China’s engineering-minded vs. America’s attorney-heavy leadership.[01:48:20] Unearthing like-minded inventors and innovators.[01:50:42] How Pablos learned salsa dancing via aikido vs. my own tango experience.[02:08:27] Why you should invest or get involved in deep tech.[02:14:45] Clearing up fusion confusion.[02:21:17] Making progress happen is a team effort.[02:24:19] Parting thoughts.* For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  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's Holman is a hacker and inventor and the bestselling author of Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, The Indispensable Guide to Deep Tech. And we'll talk all about what that means.

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  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 at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world's biggest problems. We talk about his upbringing in Alaska of all places, commonalities between skateboarding innovators and hackers in the more common computer science sense of the term.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  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.tech. You can find him on X at Pablo's.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  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 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, the lock on your front door, your cellphone's voicemail, your hotel television and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think, as Pablo Holman, a hacker clad in all black, gleefully demonstrated on stage Wednesday like an evil Las Vegas magician.

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  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 Schlage? Is that how you say that?

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Schlage.

• 3:27Tim Ferriss?

  Schlage locks, the kind that you likely have in your front door of your house, can quickly be opened by banging a filed down key with a small mallet. Likewise, Holman used a snippet of JavaScript to create a link that forced CNNMoney.com to load a modified Onion story, saying that iTunes Store would soon be selling Tim O'Reilly's home movies for $1.99 apiece. Then, I'm just going to paraphrase here. "In the interest of time, called up a volunteer. This one, a young man sporting a headband, also had an RFID-enabled credit card. Holman waved a magic reader over the kid's pocket. Up popped the kid's credit card number and expiration date on the projection screen, with a few digits X'd out. Turns out that after months of trying to figure out how to break the encrypted information transferred by the card, Holman just bought a merchant card reader on eBay for $8."

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  It was wild times.

• 4:33Tim Ferriss?

  Wild times. So I just want to read some notes from a mutual friend of ours to give people a taste of where we're going. I put shorthand here. Password stealing robot? Question mark. Keychain unlocking within a square mile? Question mark. Hardware in a car in Seattle downloading and reuploading hard drives from unsecure wifi. Printing food. Things that taste like steak? Question mark.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  So, so far, that's all. Is that all fact-ish?

• 5:07Speaker 04

  There's something factual about all of them, but certainly something must be exaggerated.

• 5:12Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly something must be exaggerated. Well, we will find out. Let's begin with question around this term hacker.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  All right.

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  What is a hacker to you? And do you consider yourself a hacker?

• 5:23Speaker 04

  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 Apple twos 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.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  And so I learned the hard way. And then for the first, I don't know, couple decades of my career was all about trying to do new things with computers and, and advanced computers. And I didn't have any formal training. I didn't go to college. Software development was invented long after I got started. So there's a lot I didn't get that most people get. And so a hacker is somebody who I think is attracted to puzzles. They are attracted to computer security 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.

• 6:45Tim Ferriss?

  How did you end up acquiring a computer in Alaska?

• 6:49Speaker 04

  So my dad had put some of the first. You know, mainframes in the oil industry in the early seventies, let's say. So he kinda, 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.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  You know, it didn't have hardly any memory. It was super slow, but I was lit up. And so I tried to convince everyone around me that this computer was gonna be amazing someday. And no one believed me. They'd never seen a computer, but they were sure they weren't cool. And so I was like inviting girls over to my basement to show them my computer. And is that what they called it back then? It made an impression, just not the one that, you know, maybe I was going for. So I'm still doing that, you know, I'm still trying to convince people that these technologies are important.

• 8:04Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm trying to pull from your book, which I've been devouring. Deep Future, Creating Technology That Matters, about three quarters of the way through. And I'm going to do something dangerous because I just got off of opioid painkillers for my arm surgery. Try to pull from memory.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Way to go.

• 8:21Tim Ferriss?

  But let's give it a good college try. Do hackers ask some version of not what does this do, but what can I get this to do?

• 8:31Speaker 04

  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?

• 8:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  And they're starting from a completely different position. They're going to take out the screws, break into a lot of pieces. You've met Sammy.

• 9:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  He's the poster child for this, you know?

• 9:07Tim Ferriss?

  Could you?

• 9:08Speaker 04

  He's violating the warranty before he got the shrink wrap off.

• 9:10Tim Ferriss?

  Cute, just for entertainment value. People can listen to my conversation with Sammy Camcorder here about his amazing adventures and his crime and punishment involving MySpace.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  He wasn't allowed to touch computers for a while.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  He's just the most delightful hacker.

• 9:24Tim Ferriss?

  He is a super delightful human. What did he do with Google Maps?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:40Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  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 jams.

• 10:00Tim Ferriss?

  Just red all the way.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, they all look like traffic jams. And so Sammy could manipulate the traffic. I mean, Google's since fixed this, but I often like to show off Sammy on stage. And so I've shown his exploits a bunch of times, and that's one of them.

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 11:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 11:41Tim Ferriss?

  So if you've been curious about trying truly wild or truly delicious aged red meat, this is the best way in. Try it out. Visit maui venison.com/tim. That's M-A-U-I, like Maui, the island, and Nui, N-U-I, which is big Maui, by the way. Sort of the Pangaea of Hawaii before things split apart and so on. Maui Nui Venison, M-A-U-I-N-U-I, venison.com/tim, and claim your complimentary starter pack. Check it out, guys. Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, etc., before I get to the email and

• 12:25Tim Ferriss?

  the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time. For me, let's just say I'm a writer and entrepreneur. I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today's sponsor is so interesting. It's been one of the greatest energetic unlocks in the last few years. So here we go. I need to find people who are great at managing, and that is where Cresset Family Office comes in. You spell it C-R-E-S-S-E-T. Cresset Family Office. I was introduced to them by one of the top CPG investors in the world. Cresset is a prestigious family office for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs.

• 13:10Tim Ferriss?

  The complex financial planning, uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay, wires, all the dozens of other parts of wealth management and just financial management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most, making things, mastering skills, spending time with the people I care about. And over many years, I was getting pulled away from that stuff at least a few days a week and have completely eliminated that. So experience the freedom of focusing on what matters to you with the support of a top wealth management team. You can schedule a call today at cressetcapital.com/tim. That's spelled C R E S S E T, cressetcapital.com/tim to see how Cresset can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth.

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's cressetcapital.com/tim. And disclosure, I am a client of Cresset. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course, all investing involves risk, including loss of principal. So do your due diligence.

• 14:13Tim Ferriss?

  What makes for a good hacker?

• 14:16Speaker 04

  You know, the hackers have one way or another ended up being the people who start from that position I described. You know, they're the ones who don't take the conventional wisdom of what something is.

• 14:29Tim Ferriss?

  Masters of off-label use.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, off-label. And so they're creative in a sense. They are the people who figure out what is possible. You can't invent a new technology by reading the directions. That's just never happened.

• 14:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  Ever. So a hacker, you know, I'm interested in their minds as inventors. I'm interested in their minds as creative people who are going to figure out how to elevate what humans can do. And so a good hacker is somebody who is willing to do that. You know, 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. And I'm like, yeah, you could probably tell me what I should do. And what I realized is magicians, getting to know them, are like these people who will spend

• 15:25Speaker 04

  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, their, the things they invent. And, you know, you could say maybe what magicians are inventing is useless. And you could argue that a lot of what hackers are inventing is useless. It's like, why are you spending all of your time trying to figure out how to fuck with Google Maps? They're just gonna fix that bug and then it'll be useless. But to Sammy, it's no problem at all. Like, that is what he wants to do with his time. And so I think a big part of it, too, is this, you could say as a class, maybe hackers

• 16:08Speaker 04

  have ADHD, but they can focus on what they're interested in. And when they get interested in a puzzle, they'll just go deep. And so you have to do that as well, to get somewhere that no one's gotten before. This is actually my, the reason I think I'm here, because I want you to know that you are the hacker. You're like a very important hacker. And you don't think of yourself that way. But the reason is, you are the one who showed people that what hackers can, are doing, can be taken places that are not computers. And you did that with all the things in your books. You know, that's what the tango thing is, and the wrestling thing is, and all those examples, you know, swimming and all the things that you showed in your books.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  That's the exact same thing hackers are doing, and you're showing them that it can go somewhere else. And that means a lot to me, because I'm trying to get hackers to see that they could go somewhere else, besides computers.

• 17:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right, outside of software.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you for saying that.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's a huge compliment, Carl, 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.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:21Tim Ferriss?

  Rodney Mullen, could you describe for people who Rodney Mullen is?

• 17:24Speaker 04

  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

• 18:05Speaker 04

  important thing. Hackers are one source of inventor, but skateboarder is inventor. There's a difference between Rodney and every other skateboarder. And that difference is that Rodney will imagine something in his mind that's never been done before, maybe impossible. He can spend months, every night, trying to make it happen on a skateboard, and then finally get it.

• 18:32Tim Ferriss?

  Did he grow up in Santa Monica?

• 18:33Speaker 04

  No, he grew up in rural Florida. So we have this kind of odd, parallel childhood. I mean, Rodney is way more important than me, but Rodney's childhood was in rural Florida, no neighbors, like a farm. And he had a little patch of cement in the driveway. His entire skateboarding life started there. No one around him could skateboard. He didn't have any influences. He just had his brain and the skateboard. So he invented what was possible. And so I think that is so important. So it's kind of analogous to my Apple II and Alaska thing. But what's so cool about it is that once Rodney does a new trick, puts it on YouTube, two weeks later,

• 19:16Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  The zero to one, that first time is incredibly hard. It takes lifetimes. It takes careers. It takes everything you've got to do something the first time that humans have never seen before. Every time after that, the second time to the nth time, that's craft. That is not invention. That's not art. That's craft. You know, you need a skill to do it, right? You need to be able to skate to invent. But I want people to understand how important inventors are. And we throw them under the bus. You don't know anybody, probably besides me, whose business card says inventor. It's not a legitimate career choice.

• 20:02Tim Ferriss?

  I only know one person, a guy named Stephen Key, who's just prolific in the toy world, but.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Okay, cool.

• 20:08Tim Ferriss?

  He's the only, he's literally the only one.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  But how many music artists could you name?

• 20:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  Or painters?

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  A hundred.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Or, yeah, or like actors. And it's just the contrast of extremes. It's our most important creative class, inventor, and they don't count. And I think we got to fix that.

• 20:27Tim Ferriss?

  I want to dive into some of the, the personal, because some of the magic tricks, so to speak. I want to try to unpack a bit.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 20:36Tim Ferriss?

  And it might be pearls before swine, because I'm not technical.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  It's okay.

• 20:40Tim Ferriss?

  Do not know how to program. But I am curious, for instance, this robot, I don't remember its name.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Oh, the hacker bot.

• 20:48Tim Ferriss?

  The hacker bot with a printer attached, right?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:52Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, what did this do?

• 20:53Speaker 04

  It had a screen, not a printer.

• 20:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, how did that work?

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 20:56Tim Ferriss?

  And what did it do? Maybe you could describe it.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  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. Cause we're super geniuses with a machine shop. I had the Blue Origin machine shop. So I figured we could, we could build a robot. So we started, you know, like Eric is amazing. 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.

• 21:35Tim Ferriss?

  Great friend to have.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, great friend to have. So Eric starts trying to get PWM controllers and all the stuff to build a robot. I bought the wheels, you know, I'm real, because I'm good at buying wheels. You know, we started building this thing, kind of, you know, assembling it as it goes.

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  And these are robots for a competition?

• 21:52Speaker 04

  No, we just were making a robot for no good reason.

• 21:54Tim Ferriss?

  I got, I got.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  And eventually we figured out it should have a reason.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:21Tim Ferriss?

  At a conference.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Anywhere.

• 22:23Tim Ferriss?

  Anywhere.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. It'd drive up to them and then show them their passwords on the screen. Cause you know, we had all the tools for cracking Wi-Fi.

• 22:30Tim Ferriss?

  This is a Wi-Fi password?

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're cracking Wi-Fi at the time. One of our buddies had made a tool called Airsnort 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.

• 23:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're like, wow.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of got to keep your prospective enemies as close as possible.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  I came unarmed.

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  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, I was very, very nervous.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Fair enough. You're not the only one.

• 23:44Tim Ferriss?

  Is it fair to say, and I tend to tilt a little dystopian, so I'll just disclose that in advance, that If you are a legitimate target who is non-technical

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:57Tim Ferriss?

  of a very competent hacker that your goose is cooked, I'm sure there are

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:02Tim Ferriss?

  basic digital hygiene things that you can do.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  You've heard them all.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  What are your thoughts? Because I've talked to people, for instance, in the intelligence community and they're like, oh yeah, if you're the target of a state actor and like

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:13Tim Ferriss?

  the entire machine behind it, they're like, they're gonna get your stuff.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. The problem is, it is a moving target. So there's this kind of war of escalation between attackers and defenders. And a lot of what people are familiar with is just kids in Romania screwing around, try and attack against every IP address of the internet and see what falls in their lap. That's kind of, you know, stealing credit cards and Bitcoin wallets and stuff. So that you could kind of say 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.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  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 gonna save it for a really, really, really good use, right?

• 25:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  The day I use it, I risk someone figuring out that it exists. So I want it to be what's called zero day. So you don't use those lightly. So most people don't have anything to worry about because governments don't give a shit about you. And so I think you're fine. If they start to, then you're gonna have a problem.

• 25:40Tim Ferriss?

  What does the marketplace look like for zero-day exploits, right? Because I've heard of, say, Israeli developers formerly of intelligence.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Developing these exploits, these zero click exploits, if I'm using the term correctly. And then they sell it for like a million dollars a pop or two million dollars a pop for specific targets or something like that. But how does that transaction actually take place?

• 26:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:13Tim Ferriss?

  Which means you don't have to click on it.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:30Tim Ferriss?

  Those are the brokers.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, the brokers.

• 26:32Tim Ferriss?

  Do you find those people on the dark web or is it like a referral of a referral?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  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 US. But you can't get away with selling it to even a corporation in the US because, you know, to use an exploit like that for corporate espionage, you're getting into very risky turf. American hackers don't want to play that game because they can make more money doing legit stuff. If you're a Romanian hacker, there's no six figure job for you.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  So you might play with seeing how I can use that to get Bitcoin wallets or something. Love Romania, by the way.

• 27:27Tim Ferriss?

  I do too.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:28Tim Ferriss?

  Love, I was just there a few months ago.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Amazing hacker.

• 27:30Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, go to Brashov if you have the chance, folks. Also, little known fact, lots of bears in Romania. I find that to be, I find 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, like you see this with all sorts of things where there's a particular tennis school in Russia that produces just an absurd percentage of top tennis players for a decade or two.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:01Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, there's two.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Things that caused 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 do. And so there's a center of gravity there. Germany had these extraordinary hackers that would blow our minds. You know, we would go over there and just wonder why we were

• 28:42Tim Ferriss?

  You say had, past tense.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  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. And so that was cool. But what happened is in the early 2000s, Microsoft started to get serious about computer security. And they started to import hackers to Seattle from everywhere. I was in Seattle at the time, again, graduating out of hacking and computer stuff into other things. But all my friends were hackers. And what was great is we had this critical mass of hackers from all over the world, including Germany and all these places that Microsoft imported. So that was a center of gravity for a while.

• 29:28Tim Ferriss?

  Must have been fun grabbing dinner or drinks with that crew after work.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Talking about the movie with Ben Stiller.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Not the movie. This is an app before Foursquare. It's like the predecessor to Foursquare. And so you'd send a text to this one number, and then it would go to all your friends. And so you'd send this text and like, I'm at the bar. And immediately like 100 friends would get the text and then like, I'll go to the bar. So we were like, the drinking rate amongst hackers just went off the charts. But we were hanging out together all the time. And that was actually really cool. Community vibe for hackers. And we had some hackers that were good at getting people together. So that was a good era. I think it's hard to say where a center of gravity is. Hackers have conventions that they go to now.

• 30:19Tim Ferriss?

  What are the most interesting to you?

• 30:22Speaker 04

  DefCon kinda got a little out of control. I think it's a little too big. And then we did SchmooCon 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 US.

• 30:36Tim Ferriss?

  Leave my phone to my hotel room.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, TourCon if you, oh yeah, don't take any computers to these things. But, you know, go naked and you'll be fine.

• 30:44Tim Ferriss?

  Naked and afraid.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 30:46Tim Ferriss?

  CCC edition. Let me just pull on this geographic thread a little bit. And then we're gonna

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 30:55Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Oh my god. Geopolitics.

• 31:10Tim Ferriss?

  Promising start.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  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 kinda see it if you're gonna say geopolitically, on technology in general, China and the US are definitely trying to play.

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  And you can see a lot of places that I won't name, like Europe, that you absolutely could say are not playing. And so you'll see how that plays out. You can see how it plays out with lots of technologies.

• 31:58Tim Ferriss?

  What are the main technologies? I mean, well, these days, semiconductors and AI, are we talking about?

• 32:03Speaker 04

  These days, those are the biggest ones. And the reason they're so big is they're generally applicable. Computers can be applied to everything. They'll end up, if you haven't got one in your pocket by now, you will. I mean, it's just, they go everywhere. So 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 US 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.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:05Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think the hyperscalers will actually help resurrect nuclear energy in the US?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  I think hyperscalers 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 advertised to get you to buy from them.

• 33:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, speaking of dodgeball, I think in your book, you wrote that at one point, was it the Senate was like switching players on a dodgeball team between Chevron and someone else?

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, I would say the oil industry probably staffed Congress for most of our lives. Now it's hyperscalers. And so we are getting the legislation that we need. You know, last year, the most bipartisan bill I know of was called Advance. That was to build nuclear reactors in the US. 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,

• 34:49Speaker 04

  where I was before. And for the last 18 years, you've seen me onstage telling people, "Nuclear reactors are awesome, and they're coming," and they weren't coming. And that is because the NRC regulated them into oblivion. That is all changed now. And as of this year, this is crazy, as of this week. So we have now a nuclear reactor company, I should describe, which has invented a reactor that fits in a borehole. They bury it a mile deep. So this reactor is unquestionably safe.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's like the size of a small car or something like that?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  It's the size of a Toyota, not more complicated than a Toyota. And the thing can be made in a factory like a Toyota. But it's buried under 10 billion tons of rock. It's something that if anything went wrong, there'd be no radioactivity at the surface. It's a mile from anyone's backyard.

• 35:42Tim Ferriss?

  And when you retire it, or when it stops functioning?

• 35:45Speaker 04

  You fill the hole with dirt.

• 35:45Tim Ferriss?

  Just bury it?

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. Leave the uranium where we found it. Like, it's a really exciting way of making nuclear reactors. There's a water in the borehole that goes down and cools it. And what's so fascinating is if you look at like a Fukushima-type problem, there's these pumps that are supposed to be pumping water through the reactor core to cool it. And those pumps could fail. Well, the water pressure in the borehole from gravity creates enough pressure to cool the reactor.

• 36:16Tim Ferriss?

  Gravity's been pretty reliable so far.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Pretty reliable so far. So then that makes steam that goes back up, and you run a turbine like, and a generator like everyone else. So the reason I'm describing this is that that company was on a track to get the reactor approved in a couple of years, build a test core at a national lab over a couple of years, then build a commercial reactor in like 2029. The Department of Energy is pushing them to do all of that by July.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  They will deploy their first reactors in July. It's insane. It's awesome. And then we'll make thousands in a giga factory.

• 36:53Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think the US is kind of a day late and a dollar short in terms of waking up to the reality? Because my understanding, and I'm not going to get the number right, but looking at China, they have, how many?

• 37:04Speaker 04

  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 a reactor and those are big ones. They're smoking it. It's amazing.

• 37:19Tim Ferriss?

  Is that, well, maybe it's cleaned up, but mostly legacy technology in terms of?

• 37:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 37:53Tim Ferriss?

  That's a regulatory hurdle?

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Just because the US 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 bore hole, no new technology, just a simple design and you get the containment for the price of a hole. And we have a whole industry that's real good at holes.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well, the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 Next Gen, the same single scoop, once a day product that I use myself. But now with more vitamins, more minerals and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport. One of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry. So check them out.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  So if you were, not saying you would agree to this, but if you were brought in by people you trust to advise the current administration on what the US needs to do

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:53Tim Ferriss?

  to remain globally strategically advantaged.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:00Tim Ferriss?

  Or at least not lose.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:02Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of those pieces of advice that you would give?

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Wow, well, I'd say the number one thing is going to be energy. In energy, the number one thing is fission reactors. Love fusion, hope we get it someday. Don't hold your breath. We have other technologies that I think could happen sooner than fusion that we could talk about like space solar. But I would say aggressively deploy nuclear reactors. Make that as easy as possible. I mean, the biggest problem remaining is the litigious nature of the US. So you start a nuclear reactor project, you get a thousand lawsuits. We gotta squelch that because we're competing with China and China doesn't have that problem. And so make a clean regulatory track that makes it possible to deploy these things at scale. So that's the most important thing.

• 40:50Speaker 04

  If you get nuclear reactors, you solve a lot of other problems for free. And so I think that with limited attention span, that would be where my focus would be. Commercially, we can take care of the chips and everything after that.

• 41:02Tim Ferriss?

  I maybe just patting myself on the back here in a self congratulatory way, but when you talk about Sequencing, picking the proper sequence of problems to solve.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 41:15Tim Ferriss?

  It just makes me so happy because I feel like.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  That's your mantra.

• 41:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:39Tim Ferriss?

  Where it's like, yeah, you can try to fix these 18 separate issues. But if your lead domino is solving for energy.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:47Tim Ferriss?

  Then those either become irrelevant, or they become a lot easier to solve.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  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's gonna work great once you have a nuclear reactor to power your recycling plant. But we're not there. We're burning gas to do it. And you watch out your window when the truck comes, it's gonna pick up the trash and the recycling and throw them in the same truck.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  It's not working. And we're not being honest about that. And it placates people, you know, they feel like they did their part separating stuff out. So I think it's one of the things I'm trying to convey to people with technologies is you can't keep putting the cart before the horse. We don't have time to keep scaling the wrong thing. We gotta pick something that's gonna work. And then go build that. And you can just do basic arithmetic to get those answers a lot of the time. So solve energy first. You know, if you want to go do carbon capture, pick CO2 molecules.

• 43:06Tim Ferriss?

  Those are 400 parts per million?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  400 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 to 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.

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  And tell me if I'm off base here, but I don't want people to misconstrue what you're saying.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:02Tim Ferriss?

  Like in the sense that that is the biggest lever we have to pull.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:07Tim Ferriss?

  It is what you're not saying is everyone should stop recycling if their municipality actually sorts and so on.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  I mean, maybe they should stop. Some of them are working.

• 44:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Like in Copenhagen in one neighborhood.

• 44:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Again, something like, like plastics are part of the reason we all exist. Like they are very, very useful for saving lives in a lot of ways. But yeah, you want to use the plastic where it belongs.

• 44:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Not where it doesn't belong.

• 44:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  So yeah, keep it out of your testicles and keep it out of the ocean and keep it out of the places where you don't want it. But there are places where it can be very, very helpful.

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 45:06Tim Ferriss?

  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 upfront.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:19Tim Ferriss?

  But I'm wondering how you think about and assess as an investor regulatory risk. And

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:28Tim Ferriss?

  All of the red tape and bramble bushes.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  That entail getting something like that to launch or adoption. You have built or indirectly funded people who have built

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:41Tim Ferriss?

  Much better mousetraps.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:42Tim Ferriss?

  Like quite a lot and been involved with Nathan Berwick's lab and building technology for, say, reducing the likelihood or severity of hurricanes, simple tech, which we could get into.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:54Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, why the hell isn't it being used?

• 45:56Speaker 04

  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, the 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.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  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, the last couple of 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.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  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 it's getting better, but the point is we've been funding these SaaS 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.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Where nobody in Silicon Valley has touched it.

• 48:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  That to me, that's where the action is. I think I can prove that.

• 48:04Tim Ferriss?

  Does it need to involve hardware?

• 48:07Speaker 04

  It doesn't need to. We have a small percentage of things we back that are exclusively software, but by and large, they don't need our help. They probably don't need your help because those are easier things that other people are gonna do anyway.

• 48:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  I do things like say new algorithms in AI, but I wouldn't do applied AI, you know, things like that. So things that move the needle on what's possible, new chip architectures I do. But anyway, the point is, let's get back to hardware in a minute.

• 48:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 48:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Technical risk? You never heard of it. If I can draw an iPhone app on a napkin.

• 48:59Tim Ferriss?

  Except in my biotech investing.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  Okay, that's different. Yeah, we'll leave Boston out of this.

• 49:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  But for software investment.

• 49:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  There's really not technical risk that much these days.

• 49:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  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. It 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

• 49:53Speaker 04

  are missing what's possible in deep tech. Basically, no market risk, once we get through the technical risk. And so the size of the markets, if you're one of these SaaS investors, and you see a TAM of $10 billion, let's say, for a Zoom or a Slack or something, that sounds good. If you add up all the software companies in the world, including Microsoft and Meta and everybody combined, their combined revenue is about $2 trillion a year. The global GDP is over $100 trillion a year. So Silicon Valley is doing 2% of what humans rely on.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  That other 98% is my TAM.

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Is top line revenue and GDP a fair comparison?

• 50:43Speaker 04

  It's, I mean, you could nitpick over the details. It's actually, if it's unfair, it's unfair in my advantage.

• 50:49Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  It's unfair to my advantage. So I'm trying to be generous here. And so just rough numbers, we can nitpick later. Fact check me, guys. 98%? If you fact check me, I'm gonna win. Okay. 98% of what's left is, that's energy, but it's shipping. Shipping is a $2 trillion industry, as big as software. We could talk about that. Durable goods.

• 51:14Tim Ferriss?

  And by shipping, you mean mostly ocean-based?

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Right. Durable goods, all your sinks and bicycles and light fixtures and chairs, that's $4 trillion a year. Automotive is another 4, 5, 6 trillion. I mean, we're just talking about massive industries, bigger than the entire tech industry, and we've completely ignored them in Silicon Valley. That's what deep tech is. That's what we're going after.

• 51:43Tim Ferriss?

  What about the regulatory implementation piece? Because for instance, I was reading the book and I'm fascinated by containers.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 51:52Tim Ferriss?

  And how the standardizing of containers.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Oh, cool.

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Revolutionized activity on the planet.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  And learning through your book about the different types of fuel and just how the congestion at ports caused by extraordinarily large sea-born container ships, cargo ships, which is a necessity to reduce drag because they're optimizing for fuel.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:17Tim Ferriss?

  And the alternative that you propose seems like a no-brainer, right?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 52:23Tim Ferriss?

  But then I'm like, well, wait a second. Isn't like the Greek in? Chinese cartels, so to speak, like the sort of

• 52:31Speaker 04

  So you've named two more kinds of risk.

• 52:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  So.

• 52:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, what are we talking about?

• 52:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 52:56Tim Ferriss?

  Are we talking about JC?

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and so, you know, other than that, it's probably gonna work, you know, not very questionable at this point. The other important advancement is it's sailing. So it doesn't need a crew, but it doesn't need fuel. Those $2 trillion spent in the shipping industry every year are spent, five out of six of those dollars is burned.

• 53:19Tim Ferriss?

  You said sailing, what if there's no wind?

• 53:22Speaker 04

  If there's no wind, we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone. But we're actually really good at weather prediction because even cargo ships now need to avoid storms. And so the weather prediction has improved so much. We're really good at that. But yeah, your worst case scenario is you got a ship full of bananas and they're stuck in a dead zone. So we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone. And then they sail themselves.

• 53:47Tim Ferriss?

  Why aren't these things everywhere?

• 53:48Speaker 04

  Exactly. So they're not everywhere because we've all learned about disruption. You've seen what happened. Any taxi company in the world could have made an iPhone app. None of them did.

• 54:00Tim Ferriss?

  Instead, they ended up suing Uber everywhere they launched.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  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 sails? Do we sell this to Maersk? That would be like Uber selling to Yellow Cab. No, we build the next Maersk. That's the opportunity. Would you have rather built Uber or Maersk? So that's where

• 54:47Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, Maersk just might

• 54:49Speaker 04

  No.

• 54:49Tim Ferriss?

  Take it into hospice, right?

• 54:50Speaker 04

  Risk of assassination is high. I grant that. Maybe higher than even in taxis because there are, you know, a few big cabals globally that run the shipping industry. You might need to partner with one of them, but that's a tomorrow problem. The truth is, we can do this.

• 55:04Tim Ferriss?

  Pablo, one day I'm gonna ask you for a favor.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I might need one myself. So after this airs. 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 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.

• 55:52Speaker 04

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

• 56:33Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I guess you need to get to a certain Position of dominance in order to clear the congestion at ports. You would need to start replacing a lot of the container ships that are clogging.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  I mean, that would be great, but you know, we'll start out with tiny ships that move a few containers to islands. I mean, there's all these islands that you can't even get a ship to. We could just do that.

• 56:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Sail your Happy Meal toys to islands.

• 56:59Tim Ferriss?

  Is Pablo's a common name in Alaska?

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Pablo's is a totally fake name. Cause all hackers have fake names.

• 57:07Tim Ferriss?

  It's a last name fake too?

• 57:09Speaker 04

  My, uh, no, I'm not trying to fly below the radar at this point. My, I got that username on a mainframe when I was like 12 and I don't even remember how. So I've been called Pablo's for longer than anyone can remember.

• 57:23Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 57:34Speaker 04

  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. And cause I'm in labs all the time, I kind of need safety glasses that wrap around.

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  Are they prescription?

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:52Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  I've been wearing glasses since I was four, but I started wearing these, they're made of titanium alloy.

• 57:59Tim Ferriss?

  What are they? Are they Oakley's?

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Oakley made them in their heyday. So back before Oakley got sold out. They had these designers who were like, you know, little gods that could do whatever they wanted. And they built this factory in like Nevada to make titanium frames. But this is intensive to do 425,000 watts to make one pair of frame. And they have all these volatile gases in the casting process. 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. Oh, I have a few pairs that I cycle out because the nose bridge gets loose and I got a guy who will tighten them up.

• 58:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 04

  So, but you know, two pairs would have lasted this long. Yeah. I have more just in case I live a couple of extra lifetimes. I've been stockpiling them.

• 58:48Tim Ferriss?

  Are you optimistic? Would you describe yourself as optimistic?

• 58:51Speaker 04

  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 Pollyanna-ish optimist. Like, I don't think everything's gonna be awesome. What I think is the future could be awesome, that we have some volition in this, that we build that future 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.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  A shady future is also possible, but the balance is up to us. And so that's how I would describe that.

• 59:44Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about the B word for a second, billionaires. So I know of at least three. You don't need to name names, although you mentioned a few publicly, who just find you to be the shiniest, most attractive hire. And I want to know why you think that is? Because they're not looking for script kiddies in Romania, right? There are a lot of people who can steal passwords and who are capable hackers of various types.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  But you just seem to pop up again and again on these teams. Why is that?

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  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 gonna do that anymore, but I'm okay with that because I'm good at doing things I'm interested in. I think people are optimized for that, you know? I don't find that I'm effective if I'm working on something that's not interesting. So I've always optimized for that. So I took on things.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:01:19Tim Ferriss?

  Not my words, by the way. It's one of our mutual friends' words.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  Shiny meaning attractive, by the way. Not just like a crow collecting buttons or something. I'm just saying.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, some of these are very just circumstances that I ended up being open to when most people wouldn't. I'd say that's the biggest thing, and I think it's replicable. Other people could do that. Think about your worst case scenario. Your startup fails, you end up on your mom's couch. Regroup, try again. For most people you and I know, most people in the US, most people in tech, that's what it looks like. It's not so bad. So why are you over optimizing on safety? Why are you going to work for a big tech company or Goldman Sachs or whatever? That's optimizing for safety.

• 1:02:06Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you this. Do you think people are under optimizing on location? Because you mentioned Seattle. I'm not sure how you got to Seattle.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  But when I think Nathan Mervold, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  All Seattle, right?

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Tim Ferriss?

  Is there some engineered serendipity placing yourself in the right location? Or is that less of a factor?

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Okay, so I was in Silicon Valley before that. And I would say the main reason I left is that sock puppet attack.

• 1:02:35Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, in 2001, everything in Silicon Valley got shut down because of the dot com bubble. And so it was a wasteland.

• 1:02:46Tim Ferriss?

  Sock puppet attack.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  I mean, it was this.

• 1:02:49Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  It was.

• 1:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  I like it. I want to use it. So I need to understand what it means.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  Because the poster child for dot com bubble was pets.com. And they had this ad campaign. They spent like a billion dollars on ads, like Super Bowl ads with a sock puppet. And it was just the most ridiculous thing. It's.

• 1:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, the end is nigh.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  The end was nigh and it's because, you know, everything was overhyped, too much money was put into too many dumb things.

• 1:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  I have a bad attitude about this because we had real technologies, you know, and we got shut down too. I don't like what I see in Silicon Valley. It's too much crap, not enough actual technology. We over indexed on entrepreneur and we threw the inventors under the bus. It's time to course correct. You know, I want to find, I want the guy from WeWork and I want to give him a nuclear reactor. Like, let me arm you. If you are an entrepreneur that wants to build a company, great. Let me arm you with IP, with an invention, with a CTO. I can hook you up. Only the good ones. So that's kind of where I think this goes.

• 1:03:53Tim Ferriss?

  Now the WeWork founder is a controversial.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  Okay, whatever.

• 1:03:56Tim Ferriss?

  Choice. No, no.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  I'll take the Uber founder, any good, any founder.

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Controversial otherwise.

• 1:04:00Tim Ferriss?

  The two strong ones.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  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. 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.

• 1:04:33Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose Seattle over every other place?

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  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 Stephenson.

• 1:04:53Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna bring him up, so I'm glad you did. Yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  So Neil, if you're any kind of nerd, Neil is a demigod. So.

• 1:05:00Tim Ferriss?

  Snow Crash, Metaverse.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, when did Cryptonomicon come out, which I love?

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Ninety-eight.

• 1:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so, so, so, so.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  So I was working on cryptocurrency in ninety-eight.

• 1:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  When Cryptonomicon came out. So I'm a closet Neil Stephenson fan. And so I got an email from Neil and he's like, hey.

• 1:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  How did he find you?

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  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 Rosoma had gotten this old envelope factory and turned it into like a machine shop. They like bought a machine shop on surplus and actually the crusty old machinist 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. I'm like, cool, whatever. Space is good. I got nothing

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  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, you know, a couple other machinists and some other super nerds and tried all these experiments and that was the origin of Blue Origin. Wow. What were the alternatives that you guys were exploring? So rockets are like 90% fuel. So when you light up a rocket, you 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.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  So what if you could just take the payload, the craft, the part you want, you know, people or 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, so. 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

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  Origin. But the point is, we could get further faster by standing on the shoulders of NASA and Russia than starting in a $50 billion hole, inventing some new propulsion scheme. So we had a bunch of ideas that were really cool. And this again started in 2001. I'm gonna go to Blue Origin next week for the 25th anniversary. I get to meet some of the staff. I don't have anything to do with it anymore, but hopefully get to meet some of the folks who are taking that and running with it. But the last thing I worked on was we built this terrifying craft with four Rolls Royce jet engines that we retooled to operate vertically and made like a quadcopter out of them.

• 1:08:14Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds safe.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  It's totally not safe. This is before you could buy a quadcopter at Walmart. So we had to write all the code to do self-balancing and stuff on these microcontrollers and get it working and do thrust vectoring and all this. Anyway, we drug this thing out into the desert in central Washington. We 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.

• 1:08:55Tim Ferriss?

  This is gonna be out of left field, but I like out of left field. You know what? I don't want to leave this question of why you get hired for these projects too quickly.

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  I, for whatever reason, feel like there's more there. How do you look at the world or what toolkit do you have? What are you able to provide?

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  Honestly, I think there's probably somebody better at everything than me.

• 1:09:20Tim Ferriss?

  You're very multidisciplinary.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  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 any code I'm writing. I'm not that guy. But because my depth of knowledge is deep, I can appreciate another expert's depth of knowledge. And I think that that helps me to work with folks. A lot of people get pigeonholed into just the thing. You know, we see that with scientists or engineers a lot. That's they're specialized too much. And if you look at like

• 1:10:04Speaker 04

  millennials, they're kind of typically very flat. They just, you know, I could do anything, but they can't do anything well.

• 1:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  An M dash shaped person.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  M dash, yeah, 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. They're formally trained and they know what they're doing. Those folks get stuck with kind of some professional liability. If you're a scientist, you can't say crazy shit because that could be professionally damaging.

• 1:10:45Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  I'm a hacker.

• 1:10:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Speaker 04

  So I can ask all the dumbest questions in the world because nobody, they think I'm a little bit smart, a little bit dangerous. But if I don't actually know about shipping or rockets, I mean, I had to learn physics on the job, you know, I'm working with actual astrophysicists who know about rockets and I had to understand what does delta V mean? And I'm like Googling that shit on the side. So I had to learn those things on the job and I'm more fluent now, but I'm not formally trained in those things. But it's okay for me to ask a dumb question about rockets. And so I think that helped me a lot.

• 1:11:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's my job to ask dumb questions.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you get away with it too.

• 1:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  So that's, that's really cool. And you're doing such a good job of that because you've been able to bring in people. Whereas someone else, and you can see this when you see experts interview people, it's not interesting. It doesn't go anywhere because they can't ask those dumb questions. Ask me some dumb questions. We'll prove it right now.

• 1:11:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Zero effect.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  What is zero effect? You and Alonely are both fans of zero effect.

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:11:49Tim Ferriss?

  And I've never seen it. What is zero effect?

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  I thought I got this from him, but he says he got it from me. This is a like a philosophy that drives me.

• 1:11:58Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  So there was a film called The Zero Effect. It was like Ben Stiller made it 20 years ago.

• 1:12:03Tim Ferriss?

  1998.

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:12:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's like the fantasy of every millennial on screens right now.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Well, here's how to do it, guys. If you lose your keys and you go looking for them, of all of the things in the entire world, you're only looking for one of them and your odds of finding it are very low. But if you go looking for something in general and you don't set such a specific target, you're bound to find something. And so it's a way of thinking about like, oh yeah, if I'm open, if I'm open to what's possible. So for example, why I say that's a philosophy that matters to me. I'm running a like the most wild venture fund ever. We invest in things that sound crazy and I have to be open.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

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

• 1:13:49Speaker 04

  And you know, it would be crazy to invest in one of these perpetual motion devices. But it might be genius if you invest in all of them, so I do. Well, or at least a lot of them. So, you know, if one of 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. There are spectators in the world. They're not building something anyway. So I think be open to things and be supportive.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  One of the best things about Silicon Valley in the 90s was the way everybody was like that. You know, you could just walk down the street, find a homeless dude, start telling him about self sailing cargo ships or nuclear reactors. You'd be like, oh, cool, man. My college roommate is an astrophysicist and might be able to help you with that. Like, everybody was in on it.

• 1:14:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:15:05Tim Ferriss?

  Is the movie worth watching? Or is it really just a philosophy?

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:15:19Tim Ferriss?

  War Games, the only defensible movie on hacking?

• 1:15:22Speaker 04

  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. So.

• 1:15:47Tim Ferriss?

  What is it? Enhanced Photo?

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  Enhanced Photo. Enhanced Photo. I know Enhanced. It's such bullshit. Although Enhanced Photo is working pretty well now.

• 1:15:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Now it's a thing. So perpetual motion, folks. It's coming. You mentioned looking for keys. I just have to ask, because I know that you're focused on.

• 1:16:05Tim Ferriss?

  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 [bleep] in a one or two mile radius. Is this just a fairy tale?

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  It's not a fairy tale. It was figured out by a hacker named Major Malfunction in England.

• 1:16:32Tim Ferriss?

  Great handle.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  And so the remote key buttons that you have for your car, they're kind of like RFID's. They have a battery in them so they can emit a signal and then the car is listening for that signal. When you build almost anything, you build it to do the thing, but you almost always build a little backdoor. I watched board games. Okay. So Major Malfunction, not through hacking, but by calling tech support for his [bleep] 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 [bleep] and he explained this to me and

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  I don't know if he was drunk or what, but he probably shouldn't have. And so

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  Puzzles on the loose.

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  Go by the dealership and you can open any [bleep]. So that was just a, at the time, I wasn't going to say the name of the brand, but you did. So yeah,

• 1:17:36Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, we can bleep it out.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  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, you know, reducing attack surface for vulnerabilities. So now that cars have system update, you know, we could fix something like that remotely, but in those days you couldn't. And so it was a pretty wild attack for a while.

• 1:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I guess it still is if you're going after vintage vehicles potentially.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  Maybe. Yeah. I'm not going to tell you how to do it.

• 1:18:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's. All right. I'd be curious to know, and there was another friend who popped up in your book, Chris Young.

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:37Tim Ferriss?

  I've spent a ton of time with Chris Young for the book that I wrote about learning and cooking and so on, and had a blast. And that's also the first time, I think I bumped into him twice now, but met Neil Stephenson.

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Good.

• 1:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Who is one hell of a diversified polymath. I mean,

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  That guy is up to a lot more than writing. I mean, he certainly is a prolific.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  Neil's 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.

• 1:19:11Tim Ferriss?

  He's really into like Victorian era exercises, right?

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. No, you got all the club bells and for a 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. And 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.

• 1:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the characteristics or mental frameworks, anything at all, that distinguish some of these people who have employed you? So for instance, and I think you might have written about this, certainly I've thought about it a lot, but the advantage that, for instance, Jeff Bezos was able to create,

• 1:19:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Tim Ferriss?

  even before he created his empire.

• 1:19:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Tim Ferriss?

  With longer time horizons than anyone else.

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Tim Ferriss?

  Just changing the timeframe.

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Of thinking and planning. What else have you gleaned from some of these folks?

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  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, it's blinding people to learning what is it that made those people successful? What is it that's good? What is it that's replicable? What are the lessons? And that's why I think, you know, we kind of need you to pay attention to them because for better or worse, more people will probably listen to you than these billionaires.

• 1:20:46Tim Ferriss?

  God save us.

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  None of us are going to be around for that, but it might take thousands of years to craft that future for humanity. You know, in the best case scenario, Earth just melts into the sun. And that's if nothing else wipes us out in the meantime. So, we gotta, if you believe in the sanctity of human life, you believe in humans are something special, and I do, then in the long run, you want to build kind of a Plan B, if not Planet B. So, that's what Blue Origin is about. Now, that's going to take generations, maybe millennia to do, but even so, it would start with one small step. Blue Origin is that one small step. Can we get it started? And it's actually a really amazing thing.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  And so, I learned to start by thinking on longer term horizons. And that's not super, like a thousand year project to build space colonies, obviously not very relevant to me. I run a 10 year venture fund like everybody else who's an investor. So, what does that mean for me? Well, it gives me a way to think about new technologies. If I look at this nuclear reactor that goes in a borehole, as an example, or this cargo ship, and I say, alright. A hundred years from now, are we gonna be burning nasty bunker oil to move those Happy Meal toys around, or would we make these self sailing cargo ships?

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:23:09Tim Ferriss?

  As soon as you extend the horizon.

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  You extend the horizon. In a hundred years, anything could happen. In a hundred years, the regulatory environment could change, Merus 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 a hundred years. So then, ask yourself, does it have to take a hundred years? Or could we do it in 10? And if you can start to craft a vision for how to do it in 10, then you align with a lot of the machinery in the world that works. Venture funds are all 10 year funds. I can't invest in things that take 20, but I can invest in things that take 10. So all the money is in 10 year funds.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  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 gonna 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 a hundred, but we're gonna 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.

• 1:24:35Speaker 04

  They're like a giant venture fund internally, basically. Silicon Valley is thousands of million dollar experiments, you know, we just try all these things that could be done in 10 years or less. And in 10 years, you could do a lot. I think people don't realize, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all companies that were successful in less than 10 years. But not just that. The Apollo program was less than 10 years. The space shuttle program, the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal.

• 1:25:06Tim Ferriss?

  Empire Stapling was like 18 or 24 months or something insane?

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  Right. So what are we sitting on our thumbs for making more, you know, iPhone apps?

• 1:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  My friend gave me that number when his remodel in Santa Monica took five years. He said, come on, guys. What is happening?

• 1:25:23Speaker 04

  There you go. So the answer to that question is the answer to every question about the future, about what's happening in the world around us. We need to solve all the things in that window. Like, let's build in less than 10 years, everything.

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think that Elon actually wants to colonize Mars? Or is that a clever visual and story to tell to marshal public interest and support and so on? Or do you think that whether it's Jeff or Elon or someone else, that the most practical future we're looking to off planet is something closer to Elysium, where it's sort of a self-contained, large-scale ISS city of some sort?

• 1:26:18Speaker 04

  Two things there. One, I do know Jeff. I don't know Elon. So I know as much as you. I've seen publicly what he's done. I'm a little more, I don't know if it's just because of Blue Origin, but I'm a little more on the space colony side of things than on the Mars thing. You only get one Mars anyway. And so it doesn't seem like that good of a destination.

• 1:26:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:27:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, he's a phenomenon.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  It's phenomenal. And we need to, look, if you don't like Elon, fine. Go show us how to do it better.

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you also don't like, you don't need to like everything about someone.

• 1:27:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Or admire everything about someone in order to.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Tim Ferriss?

  Recognize and potentially model some of the things that really do work.

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  Well, I appreciate you demonstrating that by hanging out with me today. I got a glimpse of this from this thing that like a bunch of music artists did called the One Campaign, like U2 was doing it. And the idea behind the One Campaign, because they wanted to solve malaria, they want to solve HIV, they wanted to go after some big global scale problems. And the reason it's called One is that they wanted to get all these constituencies from around the world to focus on this problem. And they only had to agree about this one thing. We only have to agree about this one thing, which is that we need to solve HIV. Yeah, we don't agree about all this other stuff. We don't even like the same music.

• 1:28:08Speaker 04

  We need the Republicans and the Democrats and the Autocrats all together for this one thing. That had a big impression on me because I think it is important. Like, we don't all agree about everything. I'm a cypherpunk. We don't agree about a lot of things, okay? That's okay. And most of my friends, I want them for what they're good for and what we can work on together. So, yeah, I'm with you on that. And that's why I can work for people who, I mean, I probably don't agree with everything people I work with are about. But we need like a thousand Elons. Maybe they don't all need X accounts, but we need a thousand Elons and we need them to go after all these things. And that's how we're gonna build the future.

• 1:28:48Tim Ferriss?

  So, this is, uh, this is from a New York Times article from 2018.

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  So, this may not be relevant anymore, but I have attended a lot of conferences. You've been to a lot of conferences.

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard of most of them, but one popped up, Mars Conference.

• 1:29:06Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:29:07Tim Ferriss?

  I don't even know if it still exists, but what was it like to attend that?

• 1:29:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. So, well, Mars is-

• 1:29:12Tim Ferriss?

  And what is it?

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  So, that's just a small event. So, Jeff Bezos has that event annually. It's for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. So Jeff and Amazon organized it. It's a really delightful event because-

• 1:29:31Speaker 04

  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 in something. But it's otherwise like a normal conference. We come hang out together for a few days. Thankfully, Amazon or Jeff is paying for it, which is great. And we get to cross pollinate these folks who

• 1:30:11Speaker 04

  really, you know, often are peerless in a sense because they're world-class experts in their thing. You're surrounded by people who are smarter than you. We'll have, you know, five or 10 Nobel Prize winners and we don't even put them on stage. So it's a rarefied group and I'm convinced that these things are so important because people need a community, you know, and we have a WhatsApp group where we sort of stay in touch with each other the rest of the year and people are very supportive and helpful. And it's just a, you know, wherever you are, I mean, look, you don't need Mars, but you do need a community. And so one cool thing about Silicon Valley, if you're into, I guess, like right now, AI type stuff, you could definitely find a community there.

• 1:30:54Speaker 04

  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

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this is a good

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Community Matters.

• 1:31:05Tim Ferriss?

  Good time to explain why the hell we're sitting where we're sitting. What is this location? Where are we?

• 1:31:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:31:33Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful, beautiful space.

• 1:31:34Speaker 04

  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 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 that 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.

• 1:32:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is anything but tiny.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Tim Ferriss?

  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? Sigh up completed and I'm out and walking left. We're going to come back to the sigh up. And you say, the big building straight ahead is your target. Get to that and then go left. No number on it. Entrance is at the far corner of the building.

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  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 you at the black van. And there was actually a black van. And I'm like, wow, is this just?

• 1:33:15Speaker 04

  Now you know why Elon Lee and I are friends.

• 1:33:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. I was like, you know, this is a coin toss. I have no idea what this is. This could be the long con. This will be an amazing long con.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:33:41Tim Ferriss?

  So I remember ages ago, when it, when it first came out, someone recommended that I read Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Deception.

• 1:33:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Tim Ferriss?

  Which, uh, you made a face.

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  Oh, I did?

• 1:33:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, okay, tell me, tell me what that's about.

• 1:33:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:34:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's why I bring it up because you mentioned PSYOP. And as far as I could tell, 90% of the book was social engineering.

• 1:34:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's his thing. And it's worth learning. I mean, that's a totally great thing. It's different than hacking.

• 1:34:27Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, but PSYOP, was that a joke?

• 1:34:30Speaker 04

  Oh, I just, no, I had gone through building 77 and I'm like, hey, go into new lab. And he just waved me through. So that's why I just, I'm like, I think this will be an easy challenge for you.

• 1:34:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, got it. All right.

• 1:34:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 1:34:43Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask you a bit more about China. So I used to, I lived in China for a period of time. I went to two universities there, studied Chinese, the whole nine yards, spend about, oddly enough, right now, 20% of my time probably speaking Chinese, resurrecting my Chinese right now. And that's actually an exaggeration, but it's like 10 to 20% probably. And I have been so simultaneously impressed and terrified by China on so many different levels.

• 1:35:15Speaker 04

  You and me both.

• 1:35:16Tim Ferriss?

  And there was a book Tyler Cowen recommended, great, amazing guy, everybody should check out. There's a book called Breakneck.

• 1:35:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I haven't yet read it, but one of my employees is reading it and recommended. He said it's an amazing page turner, really well researched and.

• 1:35:33Tim Ferriss?

  The reason I mention it is that in that book, they describe some of the differences in government planning and efficiency based on the fact that a lot of leaders in the US have backgrounds as attorneys, whereas a lot of leaders in China have backgrounds as engineers. And I have been chewing on that. I just learned about this yesterday. But I'm wondering what impresses you about China? Because they really seem to have their act together. The homogeneity, relatively speaking, of the country helps. The speed with which the CCP can execute top down helps tremendously. But anything else come to mind?

• 1:36:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:36:30Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds more fun than memorizing characters, frankly.

• 1:36:32Speaker 04

  It's helped a ton. I really opened up my eyes to China. So yeah, my fiance is Chinese, but been in America long enough that she'll put up with me. And I think the insight from that book, I haven't read Breakneck yet. It's a relatively new book. I am also just kind of a spectator on what's happening in China.

• 1:36:52Tim Ferriss?

  But you have a unique, multidisciplinary, technical lens.

• 1:36:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what I 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 am excited about reading that book. The reason we invented LLMs is to put lawyers out of business so we can fix this country. And I think that's going to work. So if you are a parent right now, don't send your kid to school to become a lawyer because we're going to replace all the lawyers with AI. I think where this goes, I'm optimistic. I know I'm taking it aside here, but I'm only half joking about that.

• 1:37:32Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I use LLMs on a weekly basis for Legal first passes already.

• 1:37:38Speaker 04

  For lawsuits, good.

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  No, not for all my lawsuits.

• 1:37:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no. 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 are a lot of arcane, local laws and so on, and I wanted to protect the land from overdevelopment. So I wanted to create deed restrictions. Oh, I wanted to create deed restrictions, which are very tricky, make the sale complicated because it's encumbered in a way. The resale value is reduced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I just threw in like this county, this is what I'm trying to do.

• 1:38:25Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:38:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  And then it was copied and pasted right in.

• 1:38:42Speaker 04

  So that's a great example of what's happening. Obviously a lot less lawyers were needed to get that job done. When Congress passes a bill, no congressman has ever read it. Collectively, all the congressmen have not read it. And so what the future we're getting to here is one where, you know, if you're running a business, we build a computational model of your business now, not an LLM, but a, but still a AI, where you can run simulations of your business and you can figure out how to optimize your business. That's all happening right now. If you're in business and not doing this, be terrified. Cause by next year, your competitors will be doing this.

• 1:39:27Speaker 04

  So I take heart because what I think is it means a hundred years from now, governments will do that too.

• 1:39:34Tim Ferriss?

  So if you haven't seen this, it didn't get as much airtime as I would have expected, but. Abu Dhabi is implementing that right now.

• 1:39:44Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:39:44Tim Ferriss?

  For legislation.

• 1:39:45Speaker 04

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:39:46Tim Ferriss?

  And it seems like there were a lot of people who poked fun at it. Or I saw a lot of people were like, ah, this is nonsense. As someone who has spent some time in Abu Dhabi with the people who are implementing this stuff.

• 1:39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Tim Ferriss?

  What they already have is science fiction.

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:40:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's remarkable what they're already doing.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  These are tools to help humans make better decisions. Now, an L L M is the wrong tool for lots of kinds of decisions. But A I 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.

• 1:40:43Speaker 04

  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, you know? I just think that's the kind of story people need to get in their head just to see that contrast. And realize like, we're not playing in the major leagues in a lot of things. So we need to step up. And I, I think, you know, there's a lot that's impressive about China. I obviously, I'm an Alaskan, which is like a supercharged American. So look, I think that there's a lot of dumb shit going on in China that I can't stand. I don't want to live there, but I think you gotta give them credit for the things that they're good at.

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  Now, the thing that's missing

• 1:41:31Speaker 04

  here is a respect for that engineering mindset, a respect for like you described. Putting the dominoes in order, a respect for building thoughtfully. Respect for basic arithmetic, a respect for building the future that we want. We need to work on that. China's problem, no respect for.

• 1:41:55Speaker 04

  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 gonna copy China? And I think that's a wake-up call where we're at right now.

• 1:42:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm very curious to see where it all goes.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:42:27Tim Ferriss?

  It's, um, they're moving at remarkable speed with implementation on so many fronts.

• 1:42:32Speaker 04

  And that's, it's great for humanity. I mean, it really is. I, I mean, they should get a Nobel Prize for bringing their country out of extreme poverty. We should probably get one for, you know, I don't know, like, making global trade possible with our navy or something. But, you know, there's also a lot of accolades that I think we're not giving to China that we should.

• 1:42:53Tim Ferriss?

  So, I wanna get your take. I wasn't planning on asking this, but

• 1:42:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:43:36Tim Ferriss?

  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 gonna get this number wrong, but what is it?

• 1:44:01Speaker 04

  Basically, all of it.

• 1:44:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's like 30x, 300x the US capacity. And I believe they also require that any commercial vessel over a particular size needs to be manufactured or built to military spec, just in case they need to be. requisitioned or otherwise enrolled in an attack. Now, we're not going to catch up with that in the next two years. It's just, it's a logistics impossibility. But you do have some startups like Andoril, for instance, that talk about the only path forward

• 1:44:37Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:44:52Speaker 04

  I do think the nature of ballistic warfare is changing. I think the case Andoril would make is fairly compelling. I think we probably need a lot more Andorils. I'm not the guy who should weigh in on the geopolitics of Taiwan. But I think, you know, it's not hard to look at that and say, all right, why can't we do that? Now, one of the criticisms often made of like American schools is that they were, the whole structure was invented to make factory workers after the war. Well, now that we need some factory workers, where are they? Like, we don't have them. What we've got are like OnlyFans creators.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  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 mine. 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. So I think we need to recalibrate on our expectation of what it means to work. I think we're optimized for work. We're evolved to work. You wonder about, why are people depressed? I mean, not everyone, I don't want to disparage anybody who is dealing with something like that.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  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 it's the only reason. But when you have a whole society that doesn't really do anything.

• 1:46:42Speaker 04

  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 that like, okay, everybody needs to do something that matters. Do something where they can see how it matters. I'm good at connecting dots, so I can do things where I see how it matters in a thousand years and I'm good. But most people might be better off if they're like a nurse where you can like see, yeah, I helped that person today. You know, are nurses depressed? They might be depressed about having to do a lot of paperwork, but they're probably not depressed about their work.

• 1:47:16Tim Ferriss?

  The meaningfulness of the word.

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  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 Andro 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 US.

• 1:47:57Tim Ferriss?

  Palmer Luck is a machine. I mean, he's, he's an impressive.

• 1:47:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we can build.

• 1:48:00Tim Ferriss?

  Impressive founder.

• 1:48:00Speaker 04

  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 ships, we can build chips, we can build all these other things.

• 1:48:19Tim Ferriss?

  How do you find wild inventors? Or do they just come to you and you act as kind of a honeypot for the forlorn, the crazy, the people and the DeLorean with the crazy hair, as I heard you say once?

• 1:48:31Speaker 04

  Honeypot means something else to hackers, so I'll go with like lightning rod.

• 1:48:37Speaker 04

  You just look for the crazy hair and the DeLorean and that's how you find them. Yeah, I'd say I attract some of them because I've worked on some of the kinds of projects they want to do. And hopefully they believe that I'll at least hang in there long enough to understand what they're trying to do and and maybe believe in it and maybe invest in it. So that's where I'm at. There are times when I find out about a technology or an invention that we might have been really helpful with, but it's too late. That is frustrating.

• 1:49:10Tim Ferriss?

  Too late in terms of stage?

• 1:49:12Speaker 04

  Meaning, yeah, we're basically helpful at the beginning. You know, we're helpful in the early stages. When you got to get out of that garage or get out of that lab and become more maybe venture compatible. You know, we're trying to help people co-opt the machinery of venture capital and aim at a deep tech. And so if you're kind of on that track, we could maybe be helpful, not for everyone, but you know, that's what I'm looking for. And, and so, yeah, I would, I would love to see these, especially the breakthroughs really early.

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  But I guess is your game to attract them to you or do you go out and search in the

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  I do still, you know, like

• 1:49:46Tim Ferriss?

  dark corners of nerd them.

• 1:49:48Speaker 04

  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 post-docs want to spin out. And I'm like, yes, that's the help I need because I can't hang out at every lab. I go and I visit and I try to be helpful. So some of its labs, about another third is like rogue engineers who are working at some company that's got their head up their ass and not doing the coolest thing. So I like that. And then my favorite third is like the crazy hackers who are in a basement. You just can't find them. They're not going to Ted or whatever.

• 1:50:29Tim Ferriss?

  Rodney Mullen wasn't going to Ted when he was a teenager?

• 1:50:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, Rodney's not going to Ted. That's, that's right. He spoke at a couple of Ted events, I think.

• 1:50:38Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. But I mean, when he was like the undiscovered.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. No, right. Yeah.

• 1:50:42Tim Ferriss?

  Where does salsa enter the picture?

• 1:50:43Speaker 04

  Oh my God.

• 1:50:45Tim Ferriss?

  Because it seems to be important to you.

• 1:50:48Speaker 04

  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

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  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,

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  very structured, very disciplined, very traditional. I'm obsessed with the physical communication. I love that part of it. And what's cool about Aikido is you'd always train with a partner, and that's not true for like a lot of martial arts. You know, I'd done a lot of punching and kicking in the air with karate and stuff before that, and it just didn't land for me. With Aikido, you always have a partner, and so they're attacking you, and without words, you're trying to communicate that you want them to shove their head in the ground or something like that. And I love that, you know, I love that feeling of physical communication. And I'm not great at Aikido, and I was trying to learn that through reverse engineering as well, which also has unorthodox problems, but

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  Eventually, short version of the story is I figured out that it was an upgrade to train instead of with sweaty old Japanese guys, sweaty young Latin girls. So I'm still basically doing the same thing as Aikido, but in salsa. And I can do it any night, anywhere in the world. There are 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. You know, I get outranked by the Mexican dishwasher every night. It's good for my ego because I'm at the bottom always. And I think that's good for me and you learn something.

• 1:53:40Speaker 04

  My way of moving through the world is so heavily affected by Aikido and salsa. So anyway, I've been doing that for a long time.

• 1:53:47Tim Ferriss?

  Salsa has a huge advantage over Tango that you can find it anywhere. Tango is pretty

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's more niche.

• 1:53:53Tim Ferriss?

  Narrow.

• 1:53:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Tim Ferriss?

  Unless you're in Argentina, in which case you have an embarrassment of riches. But

• 1:53:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57Tim Ferriss?

  Anywhere else, even in Argentina, outside of the capital.

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:01Tim Ferriss?

  You can find more salsa.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:54:21Tim Ferriss?

  So to actually implement the trial and error.

• 1:54:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:24Tim Ferriss?

  Trying everything and throwing out what doesn't work for you.

• 1:54:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:27Tim Ferriss?

  How do you even figure out the menu of options that you need to run through from A to Z?

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  Well, again, you're going back to the Tim Ferriss learning style. I'm not trying to codify the menu. I'm discovery mode.

• 1:54:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Yeah, I'm just wondering, like, when you went in and you decided that that was your approach, innately, maybe just instinctually, you're like, this is all I know how to do. What does it actually look like in class?

• 1:54:52Speaker 04

  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, you have to do that. There's just no way getting out. It's excruciating for me because I kinda suck at that. But the day I got through that, and what that meant for me was like the day I could get out of anything I could get myself into, 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.

• 1:55:23Tim Ferriss?

  Every failure mode I know how to get out of.

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  Then I became dangerous because then I could just play. And in salsa, you get a different partner for every song. So you go out at night, you dance with a different girl every night, and it's a different track, it's a different girl, it's a different, and you're just making it up and you're leading. So I could just play and play and try things and see what works. So I have like this vocabulary of like bizarre salsa moves that I can do with a partner who's never learned those moves because I'm leading her through it and I know what I'm, I can feel it all. So that's what happened to me. And that's pretty heterodox, but that's what I'm at.

• 1:56:00Tim Ferriss?

  We may have more overlap than you realize.

• 1:56:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:03Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, 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.

• 1:56:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:56:33Tim Ferriss?

  I did not have any interest in the choreography. My only dance background at that point was that I had started, co-founded the first hip hop dance troupe at Princeton University.

• 1:56:42Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:56:43Tim Ferriss?

  And so breakdancing.

• 1:56:44Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:56:44Tim Ferriss?

  That's all I had, which was improvised.

• 1:56:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay, cool.

• 1:56:47Tim Ferriss?

  I did not do any kind of set routines. It was all improvised depending on the songs and stuff. And it was that physical improv that appealed to me, right?

• 1:56:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Tim Ferriss?

  The improv jazz aspect.

• 1:57:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:57:01Tim Ferriss?

  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 trap. Just had all of this cold air. I could see it just billowing out, the AC. And so I walked in there and it was just killing time. And this older woman, like middle aged woman, chain smoking,

• 1:57:44Tim Ferriss?

  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, ah, 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.

• 1:58:30Tim Ferriss?

  It was like 3pm or something. And it was like nine smoking hot women and one bored looking guy, who was like a husband who'd been sent there on assignment. And I was like, oh, okay. And then throughout the course of that class realized, oh, this is all improvised. Now this is interesting. Yeah. Now this is interesting. Yeah. And it was actually not for me Aikido, but wrestling, believe it or not, and Judo that helped. Because it's the same same. I mean, you're shifting weight, you're changing balance. You are directing the motion of someone else. The only difference is in dance, the person's trying to cooperate instead of choke you out or break your arms or throw you on your head. Yes, sometimes, exactly. I did get shamed off the dance floor by some old Argentine ladies when I first tried to go

• 1:59:15Tim Ferriss?

  out into the wild.

• 1:59:16Speaker 04

  I still do.

• 1:59:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 1:59:19Speaker 04

  It's such a good story.

• 1:59:20Tim Ferriss?

  It's a good, very humbling experience.

• 1:59:23Speaker 04

  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 leading her, but the communication was so subtle. I realized that's what Aikido Ka are trying to do and they're better at it.

• 1:59:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  And so I went to try to learn from them and then.

• 1:59:43Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:59:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:55Tim Ferriss?

  To see good dancers who are strangers.

• 1:59:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:59Tim Ferriss?

  Dance with one another because if I took you to La Viruta or Niño Bien or one of these Milonga in Argentina during kind of prime time, which would be like 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM.

• 2:00:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:00:12Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how they get.

• 2:00:13Speaker 04

  The good dancers don't show up till.

• 2:00:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they show up really late.

• 2:00:16Speaker 04

  I never go out till midnight.

• 2:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  And I could show you a pair dancing and you would say, wow, they've must have been practicing and rehearsing this choreography for six months. And I'd say, no, this is the first time they're dancing.

• 2:00:27Speaker 04

  There you go. There you go.

• 2:00:29Tim Ferriss?

  So unbelievable. I don't know if this is true. It's such a different type of dance. It may be very different, but the best female dancers or a lot of the best female dancers in Argentina will dance with their eyes closed.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. I can do that. I'll do that to salsa dancers. Salsa is super fast.

• 2:00:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Salsa is a lot. Well, tango can get fast, but salsa is like dependably fast.

• 2:00:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like very fast music. The steps are fast and there's a lot of spinning and chip. And so I'll close my partner's eyes because I can lead her and she doesn't need her eyes because I'm leading everything. I'm tracking every moving object in the room. I'm putting her feet where they go. And so you can sometimes, especially for some dancer, especially if they're uptight, because like a lot of salsa dancers will train for the stage. So they'll train choreography and all this crap. And I'm trying to get them out of that mindset. So I'll get her eyes closed and I can even, and you won't know.

• 2:01:30Tim Ferriss?

  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. It was a lot of fun to dissect that and explore and try everything. And one of the aspects I so loved was, and I imagine this is true in salsa, maybe, is that you'd go out to these different milonga, these different dance halls. Everyone had its own personality, right? Yeah.

• 2:02:11Tim Ferriss?

  There'd be one, I remember, Labiduta, I think it's in the basement of like the Armenian consulate. Yeah. Filled with smoke, which I can actually tolerate in that environment. Everyone's sweating. Yeah. And it's got kind of a, an illegal speakeasy type of feel. Yep. Definitely a fire hazard. Totally. Then there's another one, Sundaland, which was basically in a high school gymnasium on a basketball court. Just blindingly bright lights. Okay. 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'd have 70 year old guys dressed to the

• 2:02:56Tim Ferriss?

  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. Ah. 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.

• 2:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 2:04:24Tim Ferriss?

  you're always practicing with the same partner, especially if, in my case, that woman is a really good dancer, she will develop a sixth sense to read what you are intending her to do, even if your lead or the mark is weak. And then you're like, wow, I'm a Jedi. I'm doing so well. And you go out and you do it with a stranger. And literally, I had women say to me, they're like, they throw their arms down and discuss in the middle of a song, which is quite a show in the Tango world, and just be like, I don't know what you're trying to do. I do not know what you're trying to do, how you're trying to move me. And they would just get furious. And then I would put my tail between my legs and like scuttle off and recover.

• 2:05:09Speaker 04

  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 LA style, West Coast salsa. Salsa actually comes from New York City. I live in the epicenter of salsa, but they dance what's called Mambo. They can see me coming from miles away. I'm like an invasive species. They're like, oh my God, what is this trash? You know, so I'm having a hard time. I have to now reorient. And it's just a minor change in how you do the timing. And it's actually super cool. But man, I just.

• 2:05:54Speaker 04

  You know, I have to somehow whitewash myself of this filth from the West Coast salsa scene.

• 2:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  The tango world also has its factions, since every subculture needs its infighting.

• 2:06:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  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 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 gonna make an ass of myself. But of course, you're looking around and taking a gander, and more often than not, they would be dancing with the old guys.

• 2:06:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:34Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason for that is that you get these young bucks who are 30 or whatever, professional stage dancers, they want to show off every tool in the toolkit.

• 2:06:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  And it ends up just being a melee.

• 2:06:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:47Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:07:05Speaker 04

  Yes, the musicality.

• 2:07:07Tim Ferriss?

  The musicality, exactly.

• 2:07:08Speaker 04

  Is what matters.

• 2:07:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:09Speaker 04

  And same in salsa, and, you know, its derivatives.

• 2:07:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So now, 20 years in, why you started salsa, it seems, in part to get away from like the homogeneity of the hacker world, but you're still doing it.

• 2:07:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:26Tim Ferriss?

  What do you get out of it?

• 2:07:27Speaker 04

  I do it less. I want to. Covid kind of damaged the salsa scene. It's mostly back, but I don't have a salsa community anymore. And the problem with that is, it takes me a while to sort of brainwash my partners into doing the thing I want to do. You gotta 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'd you grow up? I have that conversation, the dance version of that conversation over and over again. It's not very rewarding. I need a pretty rarefied partner now. And if you learn to dance, you should get good as slowly as possible.

• 2:08:09Speaker 04

  And I did do that and I was able to have fun for a long time. But now it's really hard for me to have fun unless I have a pretty rarefied partner that will put up with my flavor of bullshit. So it's a evolution.

• 2:08:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Pablos, 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?

• 2:08:39Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 2:08:40Tim Ferriss?

  Anything at all? I have a few closing questions as well, but I'm just wondering if anything comes to mind.

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  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 an 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. They're maybe 10 or 20 years into their career now. And so maybe we can win some of them over and help us come bring these other technologies to life. Like I described, I think the opportunities are bigger. The impact is bigger.

• 2:09:29Speaker 04

  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? Cause we could do

• 2:10:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:10:18Tim Ferriss?

  That is a military helicopter that just flew over us.

• 2:10:21Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. You're trained in military helicopters. Great. We can rewind.

• 2:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, no, I'm good. I'm good. I just wanted to say this is, this is a lively environment. I like it. Those people.

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:32Tim Ferriss?

  Let's say there are at least a handful listening who resonate with what you just said.

• 2:10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:37Tim Ferriss?

  What should they do? Should they fill out a form on your website? Should they check out anything online related to you? Send you an email? I mean, what would you want those people to do?

• 2:10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, carefully I asked for I.

• 2:10:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'd be careful with the email, but.

• 2:10:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  I've made that shift largely in my own investing in the last five years.

• 2:11:35Speaker 04

  Wow. Cool. Oh yeah. I know we can cut this out, but you're an investor in Holobio.

• 2:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's one that we did. Super cool.

• 2:11:43Tim Ferriss?

  Holobio is amazing.

• 2:11:44Speaker 04

  It is.

• 2:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I think that's going to be such, hopefully, you know, fingers crossed.

• 2:11:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  We can talk about it. A service to humanity. I mean, building a proper library.

• 2:11:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:11:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. His 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.

• 2:12:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. What people don't realize is that, well, just to make it clear to the audience, you know, when you eat food. You're not feeding yourself. You're feeding a thousand different microbes in your gut. And then what they spit out feeds you. So there's this layer of indirection that we have no measurement for. Mine's different than yours. Everybody's different. We're tuned for different things and we don't even have a way of understanding that. And so that's microbiome. We're gonna learn about it. Every one of those microbes is probably a few PhDs that need to get done. But holobiome is crafting the machinery to do that, Lebkinism do that. And it's exciting because they're figuring out cool stuff already.

• 2:12:46Tim Ferriss?

  It's a super cool company. Yeah, I've been, I've been getting very involved with, you know, aquaculture and

• 2:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  like algae feed additives for cows to reduce methane production, which is frankly, very far outside of my comfort zone. Like I, 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. Yeah. I end up with a lot of zeros when I stray outside of stuff that I can directly promote to my audience, right?

• 2:13:39Tim Ferriss?

  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 suppose, deep tech investor, because it, a lot of it just seems more meaningful, if it works.

• 2:13:58Speaker 04

  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 a shots on goal game. That's why we do so many, you know, that's why we focus on.

• 2:14:17Speaker 04

  Being the first check, doing pre-seed stuff, actual tech, we'll do hundreds of these things, you know, and we're gonna hope to get a couple hits.

• 2:14:24Tim Ferriss?

  Over the course of a single 10-year fund?

• 2:14:26Speaker 04

  In one fund, we'll do about 60. So we'll do another fund and we'll do another 60 in the future. But yeah, we'll do multiple funds, but we're not, most VCs would kind of like graduate from pre-seed to seed to series A. We don't do that. We just stay

• 2:14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Super early.

• 2:14:42Speaker 04

  Lots and lots of pre-seed, so.

• 2:14:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If you could only place one bet in fusion, where would you place it?

• 2:14:49Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. Don't get me started.

• 2:14:53Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm started.

• 2:14:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Speaker 04

  Okay, fusion.

• 2:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  Or would your answer be zero?

• 2:14:58Speaker 04

  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 in history. And so what that means is you're gonna heat up these molecules so much that they kind of expand and open up to the possibility of getting stuck together.

• 2:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  Create a miniature sun, no big deal.

• 2:15:30Speaker 04

  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 the, using the force to do it. So

• 2:16:10Speaker 04

  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,

• 2:16:29Speaker 04

  The team from MIT called Commonwealth Fusion Systems now published a series of, I think, seven papers that explain exactly how they can make magnetic confinement fusion work. And the real breakthrough was a new superconductor. It's a superconductor that allows them to make the world's most powerful magnet, which they've done, and it's awesome. Crazy cool magnet, but now they got that working. We're out of the science risk window into the technical risk window, which means can they engineer a fusion reactor? So I'd say Commonwealth is probably the most well-funded, most advanced plasma fusion reactor company.

• 2:17:12Speaker 04

  They're building what's called a Togemak, which is like the giant doughnut shaped thing you see pictures of. And I wish them a lot of luck, but they have extreme engineering problems. Like it is really hard to build that thing. And once they get it built, then they're 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 long.

• 2:17:47Tim Ferriss?

  Can't just source the tritium from gun sights?

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  You can source it from the moon. So there are people who want to go to the moon and grab tritium and bring it back. The stuff in gun sights is, there's very little of it left. It's tritium paint and in your old Swiss watches and things. That's why they glow. You need tritium. But anyway, the point of all this is to say, in the best case scenario, fusion is very difficult. I really hope we get it. The upside of that is once it really does work, you'll get more energy out than you put in. So think of like a gas tank, you have to fill once and it runs the rest of your life.

• 2:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  What is that? Q greater than one?

• 2:18:23Speaker 04

  Q greater than one is the metric.

• 2:18:25Tim Ferriss?

  Has anyone?

• 2:18:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:18:57Speaker 04

  A lot of these fusion projects are very expensive to do research on. They've figured out that it's hard to get that money from academic research financing. They're trying to co-opt venture capital to do it. So I think a lot of these teams are overstating what they can do, how fast they can do it, because they're trying to attract that capital. And I think they're being a little disingenuous about it. I'm not going to name names. And the problem with that is it poisons the well for the people who do have something that could work. So you'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.

• 2:19:41Speaker 04

  I will tell you, because I am a crazy venture capitalist who invests in wild ideas, I did invest in one, and it's called nano-confinement fusion. So these guys have figured out a very simple way to cause fusion by putting deuterium together with carbon nanotubes that cause a fusion. And if it works, it'll be fucking amazing. There is work to do to prove it. Got it working in the lab, but they're working on advancing that now. NASA has done the same kind of fusion using metal lattices. So this is a very fringe area in fusion. Probably any physicist you know will tell you that Pablo's is full of shit, which is

• 2:20:24Speaker 04

  fine, but that's the kind of wild ideas that we think are worth pursuing if we can. And so there's an important inflection point there where we were able to see this works in the lab. Can we commercialize it?

• 2:20:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so as long as you are not completely insane and you have some degree of technical due diligence, given the way you're investing, right? If you're investing at Series D, then it would be a very dangerous game indeed. But if your maximum loss is a check, which doesn't need to be exorbitant in size at the pre-seed, that's your maximum downside risk, then it's like, okay.

• 2:21:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:14Speaker 04

  We're gonna do a few of those and we have a few.

• 2:21:16Tim Ferriss?

  Which, I'm not gonna ask you to pick one because that would put you in a tight spot, but could you name one of, I'm sure, quite a few or several from your portfolio that you feel is likely to be a winner? And the reason I'm asking is that I want to know what the characteristics are that give you that conviction.

• 2:21:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the heart of what you're getting at, one thing worth articulating here is like I attract those technical founders, those inventors. A lot of the time I can't invest. And the reason is, I love the technology, but there's no entrepreneur. There's no commercial animal. There's nobody who can sell some shit. And a lot of times the homework I have to give them is go find a frat buddy or a cousin or a roommate or somebody who can sell something. Cause you need that to build a business. And I can only take a few bets where I don't see that, hoping that it's gonna come later.

• 2:22:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's interesting because you have the opposite problem of a lot of venture capitalists.

• 2:22:20Speaker 04

  That's right. I do.

• 2:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 2:22:21Speaker 04

  And I know that.

• 2:22:21Tim Ferriss?

  You're not looking for technical co-founders.

• 2:22:23Speaker 04

  Every other VC will tell you, we back the best founders. That's their mantra. And I get it. And increasingly I am, I'm sympathetic. You know, I have backed founders who I because I love the tech, but they just, they spent their career on the tech. They're only making a business because it's the next logical step.

• 2:22:42Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, the other issue is that if you have someone who's very technical, let's say that they happen to be a unicorn and they're also really good at business.

• 2:22:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  If they try to spearhead both sides of that coin, they're gonna burn out.

• 2:22:53Speaker 04

  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 in, you know, that you see on YouTube. But that is a person who is doing an important job of being the human face for a company, but there's a team behind them. And so as a founder, I think you got to find the people who are good at things you suck at.

• 2:23:39Speaker 04

  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 entrepreneurs and team up? And I don't know how to scale that, but I really want to.

• 2:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Pablo, where should people find you online? What are the best websites or otherwise?

• 2:24:24Speaker 04

  I have deepfuture.tech is our website. There's a podcast there, which is mostly just long conversations with nerds. That's how I learned. So I pick the brains and nerds and I record some of them. And then I'm on all this 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

• 2:24:57Tim Ferriss?

  They can find that at the deepfuture.tech

• 2:25:00Speaker 04

  That's there. There's a WhatsApp group with propaganda and join that too.

• 2:25:05Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  Statistics.

• 2:25:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no, don't say that.

• 2:25:19Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I shouldn't say statistics. That makes it sound too sterile.

• 2:25:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:23Tim Ferriss?

  But just facts and figures that underscore a lot of important points that are pretty jaw dropping, such as the five out of every six dollars associated with shipping, going to fuel or whatever the number might be and so on. I mean, it's really remarkable.

• 2:25:41Speaker 04

  The statistics are, you know, those are meant to be a drop kicks.

• 2:25:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Pablo, thank you for taking the time. So great to hang.

• 2:25:49Speaker 04

  No, this is awesome. I'm glad we finally got to do it.

• 2:25:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, super fun.

• 2:25:52Speaker 04

  After all these years and I came unarmed, so I wouldn't intimidate your sensibility about getting hacked.

• 2:26:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Black Van's still out front, so it ain't over until it's over. And for everybody listening, we will link to all the things we mentioned, including Pablo's website, book, newsletter, et cetera, at tim.blog/podcast. You can just, I can guarantee you that Pablo's will be the only Pablo's. So just search Pablo's. That's true. And Sounds plural, but there's only one. And you will find him immediately. So that is where you can find all the resources. And as always, be a little bit kinder than is necessary until next time to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

• 2:26:39Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 2:27:23Tim Ferriss?

  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/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, et cetera, before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time. For

• 2:28:07Tim Ferriss?

  me, let's just say I'm a writer and entrepreneur. I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today's sponsor is so interesting. It's been one of the greatest energetic unlocks in the last few years. So here we go. I need to find people who are great at managing and that is where Cresset Family Office comes in. You spell it C-R-E-S-S-E-T. Cresset Family Office. I was introduced to them by one of the top CPG investors in the world. Cresset is a prestigious family office for CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs. They handle the complex financial planning,

• 2:28:49Tim Ferriss?

  uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay, wires, all the dozens of other parts of wealth management, just financial management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most: baking things, mastering skills, spending time with the people I care about. And over many years, I was getting pulled away from that stuff, at least a few days a week, and I've completely eliminated that. So, experience the freedom of focusing on what matters to you with the support of a top wealth management team. You can schedule a call today at cressetcapital.com/tim. That's spelled C-R-E-S-S-E-T. cressetcapital.com/tim to see how Cresset can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth. That's

• 2:29:32Tim Ferriss?

  cressetcapital.com/tim. And disclosure, I am a client of Cresset. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course, all investing involves risk, including loss of principal. So, do your due diligence. I've been eating Maui Newey venison now for more than five years and I eat it practically every week. Why on earth would I do that? Well, it is the cleanest and most nutrient-dense red meat. You can buy, full stop, period, and even my blood work reflects this. Compared to grass-fed beef, for instance, it has eight times more omega-3 DHA and EPA, four times more antioxidants, and 50% more protein per calorie. It is wild harvested. Maui Newey

• 2:30:14Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:58Tim Ferriss?

  Pack, two of their most popular venison sticks. I eat them all the time. I'm having more shipped to my hotel where I'm sitting right now when you subscribe and spend $79 or more. So if you've been curious about trying truly wild or truly delicious aged red meat, this is the best way in. Try it out. Visit maui venison.com/tim. That's M-A-U-I, like Maui, the island, and Nui, and U-I, which is Big Maui, by the way. Sort of the Pangaea of Hawaii before things split apart and so on. Maui Nui Venison, M-A-U-I-N-U-I, venison.com/tim and claim your complimentary starter pack. Check it out, guys. [music]