Pablos built one of the first decentralized money networks, the first experimental Blue Origin rockets, one of the first handheld computers, invented 1000s of new patents with Nathan Myhrvold, and most recently launched a deeptech venture firm called Deep Future. And now, on July 12, expect his book: "Deep Future". -- Pablos Holman and Amol on Deep Future Amol Sarva: [00:00:00] On today's episode, I'm excited to have my pal, Pablo Coleman from the future. Are we rolling? We are rolling. Right on. Bob, are we rolling? Bob? And we're gonna talk about, I don't know I think we should talk about a little bit of origin story before we get to the fund and the new book that's coming out. And I'm excited to be the first interviewer Yeah. That you've chosen to speak to Pablos Holman: about your freshly. Finalized manuscript. We're gonna turn the tables. I'm gonna have you on my podcast sometime too. Yeah, that'd be great. Apparently you have, we should Amol Sarva: have done right now, apparently you have hundreds Pablos Holman: of listeners, I dunno, hundreds or thousands here. Here. Not hundreds of thousands Amol Sarva: Here on this podcast we have the two of us who will listen to it be recorded. Hey, I'm Pablos Holman: cool with that. I once had a radio show in Alaska and we had a full studio and we broadcast. But we had no antenna. The station had no antenna, but we had 24 hour a day broadcasting. So imagine like how esoteric and weird the DJs for a radio station are that have no listeners. Yeah. Like we had the best [00:01:00] parties. Amol Sarva: Yeah. Wow. Then I guess let us begin then with the origin stories. Cool. You were born in Alaska? Apparently. I was born in Pablos Holman: Alaska. Yeah. It's hard to find an Alaskan who's escaped from Alaska, but I'm one of 'em, I've literally never met anyone who's from Alaska. I know. Yeah. They make it about as far as Seattle and then they really feel like they've traveled and then they usually go back to Alaska. Very few Alaskans make it this far. So you made it to the great capital of Seattle across the I left Alaska, I went to Silicon Valley and then ended up, yeah, after the.com collapse, I retreated to Seattle. And but that was good. And Seattle was really good for a long time. Now I'm over it. Amol Sarva: I, part of part of what's really cool about that experience, or at least that I quite admire, is you got to work with some of the real. Intellectual rock stars of the tech world. Certainly yeah, in the, I guess it would've been the two thousands, roughly. Yeah. Pablos Holman: Yeah. After Silicon Valley I went to work I went to Seattle and I started Blue Origin or helped start Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Yeah. [00:02:00] And so that was great for me and an inflection point where I took all of the experience of bringing computer technology to life and trying to use the computers to bring other technologies to life. And so that's what. What I think of as deep tech. Amol Sarva: Yeah. But how'd you even so what was the Silicon Valley tour of duty then that I Pablos Holman: started out computer hacking when I was a kid. So when I was in Silicon Valley, it was really about trying to, use the, that skillset to bring new technologies. And, in the late, in the, like late eighties and early nineties, it was really just take computers into every industry for the first time. But then, once we started putting Muggles on the internet in 94, then I realized, oh shit, this is not gonna go very well. We need to secure things. So I started working on cryptographic protocols, trying to secure the internet. I worked on cryptocurrency in the nineties. Oh. And a precursor, flus or whatever. No, not that good. Flus is not a cryptocurrency. Flus was a. I guess you could say like digital currency, but No, I was [00:03:00] trying, small group of fringe wackos, cipher punks. Were trying to figure out how do you use cryptography to create protocols that keep the internet free? So I can't control you, you can't control me. It's a level playing field. 'cause we could see that, the centralization would lead to centralized control and therefore, a sort of authoritarian network. That was the view. And so we thought if we could make decentralized protocols, you could preserve this sort of egalitarian freedom on the internet, and that's what we were trying to do. No one believed us. It seemed crazy at the time, and it has all happened actually, both directions of it have happened. It has all massive centralization as well as Yes, exactly right. We did get massive centralization, but we also did prove the decentralization. I think initially the first big success was BitTorrent. But in order to decentralize things. Anything else? Bra by the way, went to my high school. Yeah. Amol Sarva: Oh, really? One of the legendary, Pablos Holman: yeah. I'm old buddies of Bram. Wow. Yeah. So bra managed to be, [00:04:00] take the, get the right mix of crypto and usable and everything together at the right kind of moment in time to make a fully decentralized protocol work. And then, but to decentralize anything else, you need a way to pay people to contribute resources to the network. And that's why cryptocurrency was a kingpin. And early on we're trying to solve cryptocurrency and we just could never figure out how to decentralize the mint. And that's what Bitcoin solved. So the last thing I ever did in crypto was beta test Bitcoin. Wow. There you go. Amol Sarva: Wow. Okay. So I guess that's your unique qualification for, and you show up in Seattle to now build a rocket. Yeah, exactly right. Pablos Holman: You didn't, you don't need me to build a rocket. But what we were trying to do at the beginning of Blue Origin was. Find alternatives to rockets? Are there other ways to go to space? Oh, like a balloon. Yeah. We tried balloons. I, I was out there like loading helium into giant balloons and they're very unwieldy. But we did it and then we tried a bunch of other ideas, but the problem, like planes that go really high and [00:05:00] then just like pop right at the end or we had one of the ones we had was actually we didn't work on this at Blue, but it's kinda adjacent 'cause we were trying to figure out if you could make a, like a 20 mile high. Tower. Oh, out of steel elevator. Not an yeah, you'd have an elevator go up the tower and you just lob it into space from the top of that tower. Amol Sarva: Yeah, that's, that idea has been around the space elevator. It's been around, Pablos Holman: oh space elevator is different. Oh. Like space elevator. You put a, you run a, basically a carbon fiber ribbon into space and you have a tether out in space. Oh, okay. And that holds it taut. And then you run an elevator up that ribbon. And that one was impossible at the time. We didn't work on that one, but, 'cause it was too heavy. Because you, you need a glue that's 99% efficient to make that ribbon, and you need a laser that's like more powerful than anything that's ever been built. What's the laser for? To beam power to the elevator. Oh, damn. Because there Pablos Holman: can't be any power up there. There could be nuclear up there. No. We don't have a lot of nuclear power in space. There's some nuclear batteries, the idea of putting like a fission reactor in space is very scary to people. So that was also [00:06:00] considered taboo. I see. Yeah. But now. I think we could build the ribbon. One of the, one of the companies I'm working on, we, they make arbitrarily long carbon nanotubes, like ultra long nanotubes, longer than anyone else has been able to produce all the nanotubes. You keep hearing about nanotubes, but the reason nothing ever happens is 'cause all anybody could make is nano tube dust uhhuh, which is mostly useless and certainly for making, structural materials. Now we can make super long nano tubes and these guys are making. Like rope that has nothing but nanotubes. No binder, nothing. Which is a hundred percent nano tubes, so that we could use that to make the tether. They're making tapes and honeycomb core stuff, so they make the most high performing materials in human history. Uhhuh, and eventually, and it's super cheap to make this stuff. Really? Pablos Holman: Yeah. So eventually we'll make everything outta nanotubes. It's gonna be cool. Yeah. You Amol Sarva: make like bridges Pablos Holman: out. Yeah, we will. Yeah. Rebar and everything will be nanotubes, but hasn't been possible till now. But anyway. So now space elevator. And also lasers have come a long way and power beaming has come a long way. So we might actually be at a [00:07:00] point where the space level of everything could work. Yeah. Amol Sarva: Oh yeah. Okay. So you're working on that power. Yeah. You're Pablos Holman: working on the Amol Sarva: balloon? Pablos Holman: We were, yeah. A bunch of ideas and essentially what we eventually learned was nothing technical. What we learned was that from an economic perspective, you started a $50 billion hole with any technology besides rockets. 'cause Russia and NASA spent so much developing rockets, uhhuh. And we can stand on their shoulders, Uhhuh. So eventually we decided to build a rocket. The first thing we did, but the last thing we did before deciding to build a rocket was test reusability. Could we make a rocket that could do vertical takeoff and landing? Oh, we built this terrifying craft. Out of four Rolls-Royce, jet engines retooled to mount vertically. And we had to write all our own code for microcontrollers to make it like a act, like a quad coter. Yeah. Yeah. Because now you could buy a quadcopter at [00:08:00] Walmart. Yeah. But in those days it was hard work. So we built this thing and then we drug it out i
