The Famed Hacker Trying To Find The World's Best Inventors - EP 45 Pablos Holman

In the '90s, you know, we were, uh, trying to raise the alarm about how insecure computers were. And so we would just, you know, try to terrify people by stealing their passwords and credit card numbers and stuff. And I started doing that live on stage.

I saw it like a TED Talk. Yeah, you end up doing it.

Oh yeah, yeah. So then what happened? Yeah, initially I was just, you know, trying to scare other hackers, but that's preaching to the choir. So I was kind of the first hacker to sort of take the fun things hackers could do and go to other audiences that had never— in those days, a hacker was synonymous with a criminal. So I started going to audiences of like normal, you know, normal people and scaring the shit out of them. This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey folks, I'm Amar, product and design lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped vibe coding experience in AI Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm feeling lucky and we'll help you get started.

Head to ai.studio/build to create your first app. Today's guest is Pavlos Holman. Hello.

Hey man, how are you? Good to see you. I'm rocking.

Good to see you. As a, I'm gonna introduce your, a bit of your background and then we'll get to the book. I was, sure. Whatever. As an author, I always wanna, wanna get the book in there early, but we just met a little while ago. However, kind of— it's not like I ran in your circles. I just know a lot of people.

For sure.

You know, mostly you did a stint at Intellectual Ventures working with Nathan Myhrvold, and I assume Bill Gates is part of that. And I've written about them a lot and know Nathan. You worked at Blue Origin, which I have not spent a lot of time with Jeff, but I've covered space, obviously. Yeah, a lot. So you were in the early, early days of Blue Origin, and then I would say an inventor, a hacker, a renowned public speaker. And you've worked—

side hustle—

and you just kind of worked. We're going to obviously get into it, all these fantastic, interesting jobs across the tech industry. And then you have a book out, Deep Future. Let me get my fingers out of the way. And this just came out about like a month ago.

Less than a month ago, like a couple of weeks ago.

Okay. And it says creating technology that matters. I mean, I went through it. It's like, I like that you call out in the preface that you actually wrote it because some people don't do that.

And they don't call it out, but they also don't write it.

They don't write it. That's what I meant. That's what I meant. But your style was, I love it. It's like, I mean, it's very engaging and just, it flows. It's like really, it's an easy read on deep tech, on subjects that might be sometimes intimidating.

Yeah, thanks. Well, I'm not trying to be an author, you know, like you were probably a legitimate author. I'm just writing out of desperation. But I guess the side effect of that is you get a lot of heart and soul and a lot of what I really care about is in the book and things that I know about and have worked on. So it's probably a little more more unique than lots of other books, but people seem to love that.

So, and I thought we'll get into the heart of the book in a second. There, there is stuff that you write about in here that I was going to get to pretty quick, but, but just super quick. I mean, like, dude, do tell people what's— what is the thrust? Why did you write this book?

You know, I wrote it because I'm a computer nerd. I grew up early with computers, and so my early part of my career was computer hacking, you know, just trying to break and build computers. And by probably the late '90s, we had done a lot of that. And then I started thinking, well, maybe we could use these computers to advance other kinds of technologies. And Blue Origin was really the first chance I got to do that. And that was more about trying to, how do you go to space? But computers play a big role in making that possible. And at the same time, so I sort of veered into what we would call deep tech around 2001. Before it was cool. Before it was cool. Everything I ever did was before it was cool. I've never gotten to be cool because I'm always way too early, but I've been right a few times. And then what happened is at the same moment, Silicon Valley, which I'd been kind of a, you know, I'm from sort of the Silicon Valley of the '80s and '90s. Where we were really just trying to build all kinds of technologies. And then what happened, I'd say around the early 2000s, is Silicon Valley just leaned 100% into software to the detriment of doing anything else. And so we are at this moment where, uh, we're 20, 25 years into that and we're kind of running out of things to do with software. So we had to redo all of our stuff as web apps in 2000 and then mobile apps in 2008 or something, and then Now we have to redo them all as AIs, but basically it's just software going after the same markets and same businesses. And so occasionally get a winner, but it's missing out on all the other amazing technologies in the world that could help really solve big problems and really go after bigger industries. And that's what we call deep tech. And so these days I'm totally focused on that. Eventually got to as a venture capitalist, as a venture capitalist. So I run a venture firm, but it's, it's a venture capital sort of as a term that lacks nuance because, you know, what I'm doing, it really is more like Shackleton than, I don't know, you know, Mr. Bean or something. This is a, this is a very intense kind of venture capital because we only invest in extremely high-tech stuff. So deep tech breakthroughs. And it's a lot of robots, lasers, nuclear reactors, things that scare other investors. But we invest, we're usually the first investor for these kinds of mad scientists. And so it's a wild ride and we do a lot of them. So yeah, we have the probably the most wild portfolio in venture ever.

All right. What do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies. 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses, and Brex's AI software runs right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money. And take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. CoreMemory and Brex. I noticed when we met you have these kind of iconic glasses. Oh man, they're even on the the book.

I don't think I've ever talked about them on the podcast. So, so these glasses were made back in, uh, you know, decades ago when Oakley was in their heyday, and their designers were like miniature gods. They could do whatever they wanted. And they made a— they built this factory to make titanium frames, and I think Arizona or maybe New Mexico, I forgot. And, um, Nevada, somewhere around there. And, uh, to cast a pair of frames like this takes 425,000 watts of energy. And there's all these volatile gases in the casting process. It's investment casting, so you destroy a mold for every single pair. So it's just insanely intensive to do. And my— well, the story I heard is the factory eventually blew up. These gases caught fire, and nobody will ever make glasses this way again. But what people don't realize is they're way overbuilt. These— I've been wearing the same pair for 20 years.

What are they made out of?

Titanium alloy. Yeah.

Okay.

And, and so they're the best glasses ever made. They fit my face really well. They curve around and correct my peripheral vision. They last forever. You could drive over them with a truck. They're super tough. So, so I've been wearing them because I'm in labs all the time. I need safety glasses anyway. So I just— and the one thing I use more than my phone or my computer is my glasses. So I have overbuilt them and I've been wearing them so long. And at first when I wore them, people just thought they were weird. And but, but there is a thing with sunglasses, like sunglasses and sneakers can be super weird. So you could, you could all your— you can't dress totally weird all the time or people think you're weird. But even a banker can wear like Oakley sunglasses and Yeezy sneakers and get away with it. But if you take the lenses and make them, you know, clear instead of mirrored or whatever, then they're not sunglasses anymore, they're glasses. And now they look weird anyway. So whatever. For years people thought they were weird, but now I get compliments every day. I've been complimented on my glasses like twice already today. So somehow they are veering into cool, which probably means I need to, you know, again, once again, I was a decade or two early and time to make new glasses, I guess. But now everybody thinks they're just part of me. I'd be in disguise if I took them off. So this is— ended up on the COVID of the book.

Yeah. When I said you were a public speaker, what did you say? You said by accident?

Well, so I inadvertently became like a wildly successful public speaker, not because I'm good at it or trying or because I planned it. I have no— no one ever taught me what to do. I made it up. But what happened is in the '90s, you know, we were trying to raise the alarm about how insecure computers were. And so we would just you know, try to terrify people by stealing their passwords and credit card numbers and stuff. And I started doing that live on stage.

I saw it for like a TED Talk. Yeah, you end up doing it.

Oh yeah, yeah. So then what happened, yeah, initially I was just, you know, trying to scare other hackers, but that's preaching to the choir. So I was kind of the first hacker to sort of take the fun things hackers could do and go to other audiences that had never— in those days, a hacker was synonymous with criminal. So I started going to audiences of normal people and scaring the shit out of them. And it was just for my own entertainment. I thought it was funny, but people loved it. And so I got invited everywhere. And for me, it was this great experience because if you go speak at an event, they treat you well, but you get to hang out with the other speakers. They're usually interesting people. And so I figured out it was this like Trojan horse to meet smart and interesting people. So then I started just going all over the world speaking just to hang out with the other speakers for no good reason, just because I like smart and interesting people. And then, and then, you know, a few years into that, and I'm— if you watch those videos, like the— like one of them became like the— it probably still is like the biggest video on YouTube about hacking just because it was there early and everybody who searched YouTube for hacking ended up watching me. And so it has a quarter— I don't know, like 25 million views or something.

I saw—

you've seen it?

Yeah, it's the TED Talk. I saw it had like 27.

Yeah. And it's in 240p. Like, I didn't even know the cameras were rolling. So I'm on stage just kind of screwing around, you know, I don't even have a— I don't even know if I had a plan. So I certainly had no point. And anyway, so that speaking career kind of took off because Shortly after that, I realized, oh, you know, maybe I should have a point. So I started trying to make a useful point, and I started— and I also started showing the inventions. So it was like half hacking, half inventions. Then eventually I sort of retired out of the hacking stuff, hacking computers anyway. Now I'm trying to hack everything else in the world. But it's, uh, it was a cool experience for me because I got to build this huge network of people all over the world. So now I've got Nobel Prize winners on speed dial, so I'm kind of cheating at life because I just call, phone a friend for everything I do. It's pretty awesome. So yeah, speak. And then I became very successful as a legitimate public speaker, I guess you could say, because, um, I'm taught— because, you know, if you think about businesses, they all have been told they need to innovate or die. So you got CEOs and executives, they know we got to innovate or die, but the Dying part, they sort of get. The innovation part, eh, is not really their job. So they think I might know something about it. So I've been for years now kind of beating executives over the head about innovation, 'cause I can sort of distill some of the super technical things that are coming, explain them in a way they can sort of get their heads around and understand. And I like to do that. And so, Now I do a lot of public speaking, but it works. It's still a great way to meet a lot of folks that I wouldn't otherwise.

Yeah, I think in the video I saw, it was kind of comical now watching it in 2025 to some degree. There's a bit that I ran into where you were doing this demo of— I mean, I was in a hotel. I was in— I think you were like, oh, I was staying at the hotel all you guys were probably staying at last night. And it had— it had— yeah, it had WebTV, you know?

Oh my God. Yeah.

And then you're intercepting people's traffic and you're showing like, well, you know, I could probably tell if you were trying to dial up a porn video. Oh yeah. Or watch some TV or buy a movie or—

Yeah, that was a fun one. So some other hackers had figured that out. A guy named Major Malfunction, another one, Johnny Long. These guys had figured out just hanging— hackers hanging out in a hotel room are going to get bored. So they figured out You know, you just plug a USB infrared transceiver into your computer and you can send any code you want and you can send codes the remote is not supposed to send. And what people don't realize is in a hotel system, you have all these TVs, you know, 1,000 of them, one for every room on the same network. And then they're all controlled through different codes that your remote can't send, but mine can. And so I can, with a, in most, in those days it was like 19 out of 20 hotel TV systems were vulnerable to this attack. And so I could control what every other TV in the hotel was doing. I could see what they were doing. And so if they had like, a lot of them had like web browser on the TV. So I could just watch people doing stuff on their TV. So yeah, it was, it was, it was wild. But any— but look, in those days I could get away with this stuff and kind of, you know, the, the law enforcement didn't know what to do with hackers, you know, these— and I was friends with the CEOs of all the tech companies anyway, or founders, a lot of them. So I could kind of get away with stuff. But yeah, now you couldn't probably do any of that.

So yeah, I was, I was— yeah, I loved that the audience was like, look at Look at that. And I'm like, can he do that? I think I feel— where were the cops?

Oh yeah, I made a lot of friends that way. Made a lot of friends by stealing people's passwords, you know?

Well, in the book you write about— you have a— you've got a pretty brief autobiographical portion, but you write in there that you wanted people to know where you're coming from. And you did come to all this a very unconventional route, I would say. So you were— you were born in Alaska. Yeah. And you said your mom and her girlfriend, I think they lived in New York. Yeah. And they were— they wanted to get married and they just— they figured out Alaska had a good surplus of males. Yeah, it's right. And that's how you— that's how you end up being.

Yeah, that was so— that was in 1969. They determined there were no good men in New York City and resolved to drive to Alaska to find husbands. I mean, this is— there's no Google Maps, so they didn't know where Alaska was. They asked at like every gas station, which way to Alaska? And at the time it was like 9 to 1 men in Alaska. It was crazy because all of them were imported to work in the oil industry and fewer women went. And so my mom and her girlfriend drove a Volkswagen Beetle. They showed up in Alaska and had the shortest miniskirts in the state and their pick of, pick of husbands. And they picked a couple of good ones and it worked out. And I was— yeah, so when I was born, Alaska had been a state for like 12 years. So it was like a really Wild West kind of place. You know, everybody that was there aside from the Native Alaskans, and there weren't that many of them, everybody older than me came, moved there from somewhere to get away from something or somebody. And yeah, so they were very— it was a very independent-minded but like rugged, you know, very resilient kind of people where I grew up.

Were you in Anchorage or in the boonies?

I started out in Anchorage and then ended up in the boonies for formative years. And but, you know, by boonies, you know, I was in the relatively cosmopolitan boonies because we had road access. So it's only a 3-hour drive from Anchorage with nothing but nature in between. I've since learned that, like, there's nowhere else in America where you can drive 3 hours with nothing. Yeah, there it's like that's, that's the next stop is Anchorage. That's, that's 3 hours of driving and in a small town called Soldotna.

So how does a kid out there? Yeah, in that time end up with the first Apple? No, end up with one of the first Apple computers.

Well, my dad had put some of the first computers in the oil industry, and at that time that was the, the big rich industry. And so he didn't— he wasn't really a computer guy, but he ran the like what was called drafting department where they, the engineering designs. And so they were putting these designs on computers for the first time doing CAD in the '70s, early '70s. And so when Apple needed, when they made the first Apple II, I think they just needed to sell them to somebody. And the oil industry was rich. They're like, hey, wanna buy some computers? And my dad's like, I'll take one. And so he, Bought a computer for me. I don't know if it was for me or if he just thought we should get one, but I took it over. And my little brother, I think, still has never used a computer. He's good for other things, but his— but yeah, so I got one of the first Apple IIs ever made, and by extension, one of the first computers in Alaska, and certainly one of the first computers in Sultana. So there was just hardly anybody around who had ever seen a computer, much less knew more about it than me. And that's why my entire experience was autodidactic. You know, I had to like take it. I'm the same kid that 10 years earlier would've like been a muscle car tuner or something. Like an Apple II was something you operated with a screwdriver. You know, like you'd pop off the top and like, you know, pop some chips out and try and solder on new ones, stuff like that. I mean, it was very, very, it was like a Jeep, you know? And then the thing didn't have graphics, it couldn't do anything. All you could do is crash it and reboot it. And so then eventually I figured out like there was this thing called Sector Editor where you could see the actual data on the disk, on a floppy disk. And there wasn't much data 'cause these things didn't hold much, but you could actually read through the actual, not binary, but hexadecimal representation of binary. So you could read hexadecimal. So I learned to read hexadecimal Not much longer, you know, like what, something like 5 years after I learned how to read, you know, the alphabet. So, so then, then I was trying to figure out what this stuff means, like just another language. I, you know, learned English growing up, but here's the next one. So I started learning to read hexadecimal and figure out what this stuff means. And a lot of it you can't read because it's machine language. It's for the computer. We eventually see the patterns and figure, okay, This thing keeps popping up. What happens if I change it? And you can change it in a sector editor. You can edit that to some other code. And first it's just like this random walk where you're like trying different things and then eventually you converge on, oh, that kind of seems to not crash, so let's do more of that. And then, so the first language I kind of sort of learned was 6502 assembly language, which is machine language for an Apple II. And then that's completely masochistic. Like nobody would do that on purpose. But then, but you learn a lot about what the ones and zeros are doing. And that was kind of where I started. And then all through the late '70s, early '80s, you know, nobody could learn more than me. I had 16 hours a day with nothing but freezing cold outside. So I just poking at this thing. And then by the time I got a modem and was on a mainframe and I could pick the brains of computer science professors and they know as a kid, there's no pictures on the internet in those days. So I could kind of learn faster and I could devote more time to it, I think, than probably anyone on Earth. So I was able to learn a lot about computers in those days. And then maybe by the late '80s, you know, software engineering became a real thing. It became professionalized. There are lots of people who are way better coders than me because they learned properly and I learned by like reverse engineering. So, so then, then it, you know, everything kind of got systematized and professionalized. But I had that early start and I always just kept with computers, like trying to learn the new things.

Did your parents try to get you to go outside?

Oh yeah, totally. I have, I have letters sent home from school that my mom saved, like pink slips saying, hey, this kid probably should spend more time with actual humans than with the computer because he's getting a little weird. Things like that for sure. And nobody, nobody could imagine that I wasn't wasting my time. They all thought it was— this was a complete waste of time. Like, I had a skateboard and my parents would say, like, why don't you go skate? Like, because that seemed like a better waste of time than the computer.

Yeah.

So this is just an unfathomable thing to imagine now in a way. But at the time, like, it was just a computer was a completely unproven entity. And but, you know, Revenge of the Nerds, I was right. Computers got faster and more powerful and now here we are. So that was the start for me.

And how do you— how did you end up— you— I know you've spent some time in Silicon Valley, but it feels very much like you were in this Washington, the Seattle tech scene. How do you end up—

Yeah, I think spiritually I was always from like Silicon Valley. Took me a while to get out of Alaska and into Silicon Valley, but I did and had companies here in the '90s. And then, and then this sock puppet attack killed the last one. It was a— we were doing AI for the stock market in the late '90s, early 2000, and, um, and then you had a company trading stocks. Yeah, we had automated— company was called Zigo. We had automated, uh, AI systems that could read the news, figure out if what stock it was about, figure out if it's good or bad news, figure out how to trade on it, and, um, that hadn't been done before. Like 100% of trading was humans in those days. Now it's 0%. Yeah. So we're— so at that time it was groundbreaking stuff. That was all working great. We had huge brokerage customers like Merrill Lynch and E-Trade and stuff like that. But in a, in a, in a cavitation like dot-com, an event where the whole market flips, when a bubble pops, then you— everything is shut down. It doesn't matter your merit, doesn't matter what you're doing, how you know, we had customers, revenue working, you can ask, but we got wiped out with everything else because investors can't deploy any capital. If you're venture funded, that's just one of the risks you take on. And, you know, we're going to see that happen again pretty soon with AI companies. But in the meantime, it can be a great ride. So we ended up, you know, in San Francisco in those days became a ghost town overnight. Everybody fled, which on one hand was kind of cool because it had just gotten started getting saturated with these opportunists that, that, you know, had come in for the gold rush of dot-com and they kind of sucked, we thought anyway. But, but then pretty quickly realized, oh yeah, the nerds can't stay. And so because we couldn't start companies, we couldn't do anything. And, you know, it was the most maybe top 2 most expensive city in the world. So in the summer of 2001, I was like, well, we're not busy, let's go on a road trip. So we drove up to Seattle to see friends because in Alaska, as far as Alaskans ever get is Seattle, you know. So we had a bunch of friends there. My brother was there. And if you, you know, if like the fact that I made it to California is like a historic event. Like, Alaskans are stuck in Alaska, but all the planes go to Seattle. So anyway, so we knew people in Seattle, so we went to visit Seattle and we realized, oh, for the price of our apartment, we could get a whole neighborhood in Seattle because at the time it wasn't booming. And so we figured, oh, well, if you're going to lay low, let's do it here. So we went to Seattle and, and that— but on my way, as I went to Seattle, I figured as long as I'm near an airport, I can go wherever and do whatever, but almost instantly ended up going to Blue Origin. And that was— and that was at the time there were like 2 people there.

Yeah. Wait, you make that sound real easy. I did the— yeah, I've never actually read a book about Blue Origin and for some reason mostly—

yeah, I don't think there is one yet.

Yeah, there's, there's some that have done a bit, but I've never— I've covered every rocket company. Yeah, except Blue Origin, mostly because they used to be quite secretive.

And then I think less secretive and more just, just quiet.

Quiet. Okay.

Yeah. Like they didn't have something to show, so why talk?

But like in the origin story, as just the tidbits that I have is, yeah, Jeff Bezos wants to do something in space. He's kind of friends with Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi author. Yeah, sci-fi author. And they're, they're thinking about things they could do. It sounds like you were kind of there with—

well, so when I showed up, so, um, I think Neil was hanging out with Jeff, and Jeff was explaining, as is, you know, uh, well documented now, that, you know, since he was a kid, he wanted to do space stuff. And, um, Neil was like, well, how about now? Just like, okay. And so they kind of got 2001— this is in 2000, I think in 2000.

Okay.

And then, um, So then they had— so then Neil had roped in a couple of physicists and, um, and they started looking for like a building. They got a— when I showed up, they had gotten a building in, uh, south of what's called SODO, the industrial neighborhood in Seattle. And they had bought out the remains of a crusty old machine shop because there used to be all these machine shops supporting Boeing back, you know, for decades. But all these guys were, you know, getting old and, you know, they would have retired, but they didn't have anything else to do if they went and stayed home. So they kept going to work and doing nothing. And these machine shops became, you know, you could buy for a song. So we bought a whole machine shop just to get the tools, but the crusty old machinist came with it. So anyway, so we had a machinist and then we hired another, some more. And, but anyway, when I showed up, it was basically just Neil and Keith Rosema. And for the audience, is Neal Stephenson, so science fiction novelist, like, who's legendary science fiction author.

Yeah.

Yeah. So Neal is— in the book I said that nerds are often atheists and, you know, but even so they respect a few nerd prophets and Neal is chief among them. And so, which is true, Neal wrote some of the these novels that created the first, like, practical visions of things like virtual reality and Snow Crash and of, of, um, even the chatbots we experience now in the Diamond Age. Um, as it's incredible stuff. So anyway, Neil's delightful, but point is, he was spending about half his day writing novels and the other half working on Blue Origin. And then Keith was there full-time and we had some other folks, but the point is they just, you know, needed warm bodies and I was available and knew how to work computers and they're like, oh, we need some computer stuff. So that's how I ended up there.

Okay. Since day one, the Core Memory Podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. Originally, Jeff, he didn't want to do rockets. It was kind of like, let's find out, let's find out better, different ways.

It's not that he didn't want to do rockets, he just wanted to do the best thing, you know? And if you're going to start 50 years later or whatever later than NASA, you might as well take some time to evaluate your options. And so in 2001, that's when I was there, we started trying to find alternatives to rockets and see if any of them were better. And we had a huge advantage over what, you know, NASA's era because we had computers and we had a lot of, you know, smart physicists and stuff that could help. So we looked at alternatives like, you know, other ways of going to space besides a rocket. A problem with a rocket is it's 90% fuel. So you burn 90% of that thing every time you launch.

You build this huge thing. You just can't carry that much stuff to space. The physics.

Yeah, because it's real simple. Yeah. Because If I put you on a rocket, I need fuel to move you to space, but now I need fuel to move that fuel. And so it's just this exponential, you know, fuel problem. And so a rocket is, you know, highly developed, but, but it is not really a great way to go to space. So that's where we're at. So we looked at other ideas and there are really cool ones. Some of my favorites are like One of them is this idea that we didn't have. So I think a couple of NASA people came up with it, but Neil got fixated on it, which was to make a 20-kilometer-high steel tower. So it looks like the Eiffel Tower, same aspect ratio maybe, but just a hell of a lot bigger. And it sounds kind of crazy, but, you know, like turn Earth into a lollipop or something. But it— there's no technology needed to do it. It's a lot of steel, but like less than other things we've done with steel. Like the railroad system is a lot more steel. And so if you did that, then you could, you know, just drag things up an elevator— that's efficient— and then lob them into space from the top. That was the idea. And that might still work, you know, like nobody could prove it wouldn't work. It just sounds crazy, but it's not. And, um, and then another one, which is what I think we will eventually do, and we are very close now to being— this is just getting more practical every year, is you build a craft that's going to fly to space, but instead of hauling fuel, you just beam energy to it. And that's— and so we have beamforming and beam steering capability. You could use radio waves or lasers to beam energy to this craft, and then it could turn that to propulsion. Maybe it doesn't get to space as fast as a rocket, but it can just, you know, slowly ascend into space. Um, that would be awesome. And so in those days, the problem we had was that, you know, NASA and Russia had already spent billions and billions and billions on building rockets, and we could inherit all that and start, you know, on their shoulders. And so it eventually just became clear that if we could make the rocket reusable, so we're not like throwing it away after every launch, the economics of it would be a lot more practical and we'd just get the bigger win faster doing that than starting from scratch.

Yeah.

And there are now obviously SpaceX and Blue Origin doing that.

And then we still do have some people trying kinetic launch like slingshots.

Yeah, yeah.

Giant guns.

Oh man, there's such cool stuff. Like I'm sure you've seen Longshot.

So we did a, we did a video. Go to our YouTube.

Oh yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Check out Longshot. It's pretty awesome. And then I wrote the first story ever, I think, on SpinLaunch, which was this centrifuge and they're still kind of going at it, but it's, they're kind of changing a little bit.

So that, yeah, that one's a little tough. And, you know, those things are really cool. I think they're kind of, uh, special purpose. Like, you can't move humans or any biological stuff in those types of launch systems because you throw the object into a wall of atmosphere at ridiculous g-forces. But they'll get— I think the, I think the kinetic launch thing, like the Longshot-style railgun thing, you know, they're doing a practical thing for version 1. But I think, you know, if you project out in the future, the thing will be on superconducting, you know, tracks. So there's no friction and it'll be, you know, electric propulsion, you know, electromagnetic propulsion. And we'll be able to just lob fuel up and supplies and, you know, energy bars and Red Bull up to astronauts. Yeah.

What did you make of how Jeff's mind worked on those problems in those days?

Well, that honestly, I'm not really a space nerd. Obviously, I'm a computer nerd. And, you know, space is cool. But what was amazing to me is that I didn't come in with this, but what I left with was a— was, was what I really learned from Jeff, which is, you know, the— when you look at what Blue Origin's mission is, people think it's just like billionaires with their big swinging rockets having a pissing contest in space. That's not really what's going on. I mean, I get that it's good for memes, But what's actually happening, the vision for Blue Origin is, is thinking about the future of humanity. If you believe in humans and you believe that we are something special, and I do, I had that part already, but, and you think it's worth preserving, then you would want to look at like, all right, what are the, what's the long-term, you know, prognosis for this species? And what it is, is in the best case scenario, Earth just melts into the sun. That's if we escape like a whole bunch of other real existential threats, like, you know, like, you know, comets and asteroids and shit bombing, bombarding us and wiping us out, as is, you know, fairly well theorized about what happened to dinosaurs. Right. So we have, you know, we have those risks. And so in the very long run, you do need a plan B for humans., and, you know, if not like a planet B. And so one way or another, and I think, you know, lots of people are on this now because Elon has popularized this notion of multi-planetary species, but the point is, yeah, you want a backup plan. And if not for the exploration, which again doesn't really turn me on that much, but a whole generation a few years older than me grew up on Heinlein and Star Trek, and so they have that in them. And I think there's some merit to it. But the point is, whatever that is, you can't do it in 10 years. You know, we're— we live in a world, especially in the US, where we're tuned for 10 years. We can do 10-year projects, lots of them. We're really good at 10 years. Anything longer than that, ah, too long. So a project like Blue Origin is— the vision is, how do you get humans thriving in space? Not just visiting, but like literally thriving in space. Maybe you spend your whole life in a space colony or on Mars and then turn Earth into a wildlife refuge that you come visit once in— or once or twice in your life, you know, something special. This is a really special place. Jeff's vision is so much about making Earth as awesome as it can be and using space as a way to do that, move heavy industry into space, you know, do the mining on asteroids, do those, you know, do your manufacturing and construction, nasty stuff, do it in space and leave the good stuff, maybe the people even, on Earth. And, and so that's all cool. And what, regardless what you think about those visions, to me the part I took away from it is, hey, here's somebody who's learned to think on longer time horizons, you know, think on about like generations yet to come. I'd never done that before, but what helped me about it so much, even if you didn't care about that, I, I thought it was very valuable for me because now when I look at things, I start that way. I say, okay, look at any problem that you think sucks in the world. Like, okay, um, you know, I'll go back to electric cars. Let's say, like, in 100 years, are we going to keep burning shit in our car or will we just do this, you know, electric thing? And it's not hard to sort of come up with an answer. Almost everybody would think, oh yeah, in 100 years for sure they'll all be electric. And that in 100 years, all the problems that might stymie you could be addressed. It's like, you know, government regulation and regulatory capture and assholes in business and whatever, all that stuff. It's not hard to imagine in 100 years maybe you could address all that. And then, so I cheat when I look at technologies. I look at that and say, okay, 100 years, would we keep burning gas or we'd do electric cars? Okay, it's gonna be electric. So then you can start to say, okay, we know what the future's really gonna be very likely, or what we believe, our highest conviction based on what we know what it would be. Could we do it in 10? And so then you could say, all right, What would it take to do that in 10 years? And you could see like Tesla was built essentially in less than 10 years, right? 10 years to Model S or less. And so that's, that's kind of what that is. That's an expression of, oh, we want to be electric, could take 100 years. Right now we're on the 100-year plan, but could we do it in 10? And what would that take? And sometimes you can sort of craft that and believe in it. And then we can co-opt the machinery of startups and the machinery of venture capital and we can start to go after these things that looked impossible. And, and I think a lot of times, at least my lens is really about can you find a new technology that gives you a force multiplier? Because if I find a new technology that's 10 times better now, that 100 years maybe goes to 10.

Sure.

And so I'm looking for those things.

And when you were hanging out with Neal Stephenson, I would, I would find that really intimidating. And it must be. Oh, It must be strange for him to— maybe it's awesome, but just to get so much stuff right. Does he just watch? Does he just walk around and think the rest of us are, are, man, are like mental—

I, I, well, I really love Neil. Um, I mean, you know, for years— so I'm not sycophantic at all, which I think is a big part of like why I am able to sort of hang in there in places I shouldn't be. Um, Neil is a really wonderful human. I have a lot of respect for him. He's done a lot for me. We've worked together on all kinds of weird stuff for decades. Some of it's in the book, a whole bunch more is not. Um, we don't work on anything anymore, so— but I would say, and I don't think he knows this, like, I've never said this, but like, I'm a Neil Stevenson fan. Like, I spent my career trying to implement the things in his novels. And you kind of— you'll get that idea kind of reading Deep Future book. But, but Neil, like, Neil wrote a book called Cryptonomicon in the '90s, which is about cypherpunks. And that's what I was doing. It was a— it's a— it's not directly— it's a novel, but it's inspired by what cypherpunks were doing, trying to make cryptocurrencies in the '90s. And the book came out in, I want to say, like '98 or something. And I've been a fan since Snow Crash came out, and that was in '92. So before the internet, it's either '88 or '92. So it must be, I think it's '92. So I'm a big Neal Stephenson fan, and I think Neal has to write about these things. I have to figure out how to build them, and we'll see in the long run if I succeed. But I think, you know, what's wonderful about Neil, he's got a super curious mind. He is, you know, I think he's the kind of guy, he grew up in Ames, Iowa, which is all super educated scientists. And I think that Neil had something in him, like identifies as that. But he got on a different track. And I think he just, it's so interesting, 'cause like Neil's probably like, he's got a little bit of rebel spirit in him, like a little bit too much to go work as a scientist and play that game, 'cause it's very structured now and it's different than it was in maybe his era and before. And so I don't think he wanted to do that, but you know, he's a math nerd, he loves, that he could have easily just stuck in academia his whole life, but somehow he ended up— just some, some personality tick or something got out of that, and the novel thing worked out. And so he didn't go back on that track, but I think he's sort of like on the inside still identifies as that. So, um, so he's very smart, very well-educated, extraordinarily well-read, and And he loves to play with these ideas, but also map them to practical things to do. So he, like, like me, we want to build things that exist or that are real, that solve problems. Like, just the academic pursuit of, like, of just for, just for science's sake, figuring things out and playing with ideas, that's not good enough. We want to, like, build things. And so there, there's a kind of a makeup in him that's like that. And so anyway, yeah, so Neil is, um, also kind of oddly like, you know, introverted in the sense that he doesn't need a lot of social action. I'm the other way around. I need people. So I'm, I'm aggressively like, I'm on a plane all the time just trying to go where people are because that's how it feeds my mind. I need conversations.

Yeah.

And Neil can learn more from books and reading and thinking. And so he's able to stay put and get a lot done. Yeah, I don't know. I— yeah, one of my favorite people on Earth.

Okay. Yeah, sorry, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go fast through this one bit just because there's a lot of things I still want to—

no, we've got time. Or I do anyway. But you, you're long-winded. I guess you can cut this down if you need to.

No, no, no, no, no, I love this. Um, you worked at, at Intellectual Ventures. I want to give— I'm going to give my version of the context on this. You know, there's this company that was set up by Nathan Myhrvold, Edward Young, um, backed by Bill Gates and some other wealthy people, and was, was both awesome and, and controversial in my estimation. You know, one part of this was they wanted to gather a whole bunch of smart people together, invent a lot of things, did a number of things that were kind of tied to some of Bill Gates's humanitarian efforts and things like that. Of course, they end up getting pilloried pretty hard in the press at one point because they were held up as this example of ultimate patent troll, this idea that they were just going to think up things in a, in a room, patent them, and then they may or may not ever turn into something. But yeah, people would have to come to them and buy a license to their intellectual property. It's been roughly, I want to say, like 15, almost 20 years since they hatched that idea. I followed it in all the various capacities. I think I'm the rare reporter that actually went and chased down some of their inventions that turned into startups. Yeah. And things like that. I've got a pretty deep soft spot for Nathan Myhrvold. He's the world's ultimate polymath, is like the most one of the most fascinating people you can talk to.

For sure.

And hang out. So, okay. Given all this context, and for a while it was like this big, bright shining, yeah. Object that was both exciting and controversial. People talk about it less these days. Right. Like what was your experience like and, and what are we to make of Ivy with all this hindsight now?

Oh yeah. That's a lot.

Yeah. Did this work or was this a good idea? Bad idea?

Let, let me start, let me start— there's a couple things there, but let me start with this one. You know, um, if you try to name, um, artists that you know or know of, we're like painters. How many painters do you think you could name?

Quite a lot.

Okay, how about music artists? You know, singers? Yeah, also actors. Yeah, try inventors. Yeah, well I know one that aren't dead.

That aren't dead. I know one who worked for IV, which is Lowell Wood, who I think has the most patents from Thomas Edison. I probably could do a few, but more than most people. But I'm in a weird job.

Yeah, you're weird. Yeah, fine. But even so, nowhere near.

We don't have these iconic figures.

It's not a legitimate career choice. Yeah. And, and the thing about it is we don't count inventors amongst our, like, creative class. We are pretty good at celebrating creative people of other types, but not inventors. They don't count. But if you— you could probably live without all of the painters, all of the singers, all of the actors. Without inventors, you would not be here today. None of us would. I think they're our most important creative class, and we have completely thrown them under the bus in our modern society.

And so you're kind of excluding, like, do I count? I don't want to derail us. I just want to, I just want to put boundaries around this. Do we exclude Sergey Brin and Larry Page for coming up with PageRank?

Well, that's an interesting one. Okay, let's look at PageRank. So PageRank was their algorithm that made Google the vastly superior search engine starting in, it was about 2001, right? Um, and they beat all the competition because everybody else had shitty algorithms. By comparison. PageRank was a really cool insight where it kind of used all the pages on the web as like a voting mechanism for which was the most valuable page for a given topic. And that's how it ranked search results. And that turned out to be so useful that Google was a rocket ship. They had a patent on PageRank. Um, so a patent is the only mechanism we have for rewarding an inventor for their effort. Um, now we don't celebrate patents anymore, and we don't celebrate inventors. What we celebrate are entrepreneurs. We celebrate the people who can steal that patent, make a product, sell it, and make a shit ton of money, go public, and make everybody rich. So we celebrate that, and that's why our biggest success stories these days are not inventors, they are entrepreneurs. And some of them built amazing businesses even with no invention. You know, what did Uber invent? You know, what did Airbnb invent? What is it? What has Instagram invented? Like, these are our big success stories, and there's no actual technology invention that they brought to the table. So I think we're a little miscalibrated on that. Um, I think that what would be better is if we could take those inventions and inventors, pair them up with our best entrepreneurs? Like, what if you gave, you know, Travis from Uber a nuclear reactor and made the world— okay, maybe that's going too far, but, you know, make the world better by bringing a real technology to bear that can help make the world better in some way. And so that's what I'm trying to figure out how we do. Intellectual Ventures was an early attempt to figure out how do we course correct on this. How do we fund inventors? How do we fund invention? And we tried a bunch of different things. I don't think it makes sense for me to try and pick apart all of it, and probably it's this point it's not even that interesting to audience. But I'll talk about the part we did, and which was the in-house invention. That's what I worked on. So we built a lab. Again, this is another weird thing where Nathan— Nathan had built— started intellectual ventures, but he, you know, and kind of had always wanted to build a lab, and then he saw that, uh, Danny Hillis and Brand Ferran had this cool lab in LA.

And was that Applied Machines?

Applied— and, uh, it was called Applied— and I want to say Applied Invention. It was called—

or Applied Materials?

Applied— no, Applied Minds. That was right. Yeah, it's called— now it's called Applied Invention. But anyway, they had a cool lab, and so Nathan's like, I want a cool lab. So He, so he invited Neil actually to come over and see what he's doing. Neil drug me and Keith, who were the other folks from Blue Origin. This is 2007. We'd all left Blue by now, but we were the guys you call, I guess, if you want to make a Batcave. So he called us and we came and showed up and we don't get details, but the point is we built this invention lab and what Nathan wanted to do was all invent in all the areas except for software, basically. I mean, we did some software, but by and large it was about inventing because it— because a new technology, there's— so we have scientific research, that's your, you know, academic labs, that's basic research, and we have some funding for that, never enough, but basically we have a system for base— for scientific research. Their job is to discover How does the world work? You know, what is, what does all this mean? That's one thing. That is not the same thing as invention. At the other end, you got your entrepreneurs. That's commercialization. Take, take something and go find a market, find a product, serve customers. In the middle, that's invention. So the invention is the part where you take the output of scientific research and try and apply it to a problem. Can we, can, does this new discovery, new algorithm, new chip, new sensor, new whatever, change anything humans have ever done? Can we do it faster, cheaper, better, maybe in a more humane fashion? Like, that's the goal of invention. So you— and every day we get these. We get them from, you know, you just read journal articles, you know, read Science and Nature. And I love IEEE Spectrum. Shout out to those guys. They're the best. They're my favorite thing in my news. They— every day it's cool new discoveries, cool new shit for the future. It's like a— it's like a Lego box that just keeps growing. So anyway, have I told you about core memory? Oh, do— oh yeah. Oh, that's right. Oh yeah, I did your show. Well, you know, I'm on— I'm— your show is awesome because what you do is you make these things accessible to a wider audience that doesn't want to read journal articles. I'm kind of in a weird spot where I want to get these things before you find out about them. So I'm kind of, you know, I'm not your audience, even though I do watch the videos because they're because you get to go all these cool places. So the point is, I was joking.

Yeah, I triple E. Yeah, fantastic.

It is fantastic. And, and especially compared to some of the other things that used to be. So point is, invention is that spot in the middle, and we don't have a system to fund it, to support it, to help out. And, and when you look at inventors, and I know a lot of them, you know a lot of them, these are very special people. Now, these are people who sacrifice a lot. They sacrifice— they could have been Bitcoin miners, they could have made a fintech company, they could have been a SaaS hole investor, they could have done all these other things. They've sacrificed on that to try to figure out a new thing, something that the world doesn't have. It's never been done before. Those people are special, and we don't support them. They're in a garage with crazy hair and a DeLorean, and they can't afford Uber Eats delivery. Okay. So that's the— and then if you imagine that person and then they gotta, once they got their thing, they gotta write a patent. Like, I don't know if you've read, I mean, patents, I used to love reading the old patents. They're beautiful. They're works of art. Now, if I invent something, lawyers turn it into 800 pages. I can't even tell what I invented anymore. It's just a complicated game. But, you know, now you gotta get a patent. If you're a great inventor, you might get 3 a year. A patent is basically 10 years before the startup, right? So you— we all know, we're all very familiar with like the failure rate of startups, but a patent is 10 years before the startup because you have to— yeah, I got the patent, now it's all this work just getting to the point where somebody might invest and make a startup. So you're going to be wrong so much, you're going to be wrong almost all the time because you can't guess 10 years in advance. What the market's going to want, what other technologies might come, what the competitive landscape is going to be, who's going to get hit by a bus in the meantime. Like, everything could go wrong. So the only solution to, to that extreme risk is, is the power law. That's shots on goal. Now, we all understand this from venture capital because that's what venture does. Venture says, okay, I'm going to take $100 million, going to put it in 10 startups. They're— 9 of them are gonna go to shit, and one of them is going to pay for all the failures. That's the 10-to-1 game. At Intellectual Ventures in the lab, we were in the 1,000-to-1 game. So we would get 1,000 patents on our own inventions and try and get one of them to pay for all the failures. And you can't guess at the beginning which one, so you have to get all 1,000. A patent for us cost $150,000, $200,000 in its lifetime. So you do that 6,000 times. We did 6,000 patents on our own inventions. And at our scale, we get enough hits to make it all work. But I don't know anybody else on earth who works at that scale. So that's what I'm saying. There's a real fundamental problem here with how we support inventors. Now, you could bitch and moan about intellectual ventures having too many patents, buying too many patents, suing people for infringing on their patents or whatever. But until you have a better idea about how we're going to invest in and support invention, I don't want to hear it.

Yeah. And I mean, you hit on this, but yeah, for some people who don't know, I mean, I spent quite a bit of time with Intellectual Ventures and there were worlds that I was not aware of, which is that there are these, these inventors, these scientists all around the world, and they, they really are kind of struggling sometimes. And they're coming up with these ideas and they don't— they're sometimes not really wired to deal with all the mechanics that go with it, or they're this lone wolf a little bit.

Yeah.

And so there was this, this hope to put some of this structure, offer them some money, make, make this into a way to support them. Yeah. You know, one of the inventions that came out, which you write about in your book, was, was TerraPower. I mean, TerraPower came out of—

yep—

Intellectual Ventures. The original idea was that You would take the waste nuclear matter from, from other nuclear reactors and kind of reuse it and create energy. That story has been playing out for 20 years plus. And, and let's get into that for a second. So again, I'm kind of curious what we've learned because so, so we, we were trying to do this amazing thing, take this, this waste energy harvest it, use it. And, and then a bunch of things happened, which one of which was like the US. So Bill Gates was buying this company. I mean, he was chairman, I think the biggest funder. Yeah. At that time, this is kind of, this is, I mean, I would say this is like peak Bill Gates, richest man in the world. Yeah. Super powerful. You know, just, just sort of could not get it done in the United States.

Yeah. Right.

The people most interested or China.

Yeah. And then, so we— I could, I could sort of add some color. I mean, first, just so it's clear, I don't work for Intellectual Ventures anymore, and I, uh, and I don't work for— I don't speak for or work for TerraPower at all, um, and I am very far removed from them and what they're doing now. So take my comments as historical. Um, so the TerraPower reactor is— you could think of it as the most advanced nuclear reactor. Um, we call them Gen 4 reactors. And what this is, is a— we call it a nuclear reactor, but really it's more like a nuclear waste recycling machine. You take the uranium left over from making reactors and making bombs— we have a lot of that— you put it in our reactor, in the TerraPower reactor. It's called a traveling wave reactor., and it can enrich that fuel and burn it inside. So there's no enrichment process anymore. So that, that gets rid of the proliferation risk, which is about people stealing nuclear fuel to make bombs. That goes away. In this reactor, you fuel it once and it runs for like 50 or 60 years. And because of how it's enriching the fuel, there's never a critical mass of fissionable material, meaning it can't melt down like a Chernobyl or something. You only have a little bit. If it— if something went wrong, it just kind of fizzled out like a cigar in the rain. So that reactor design, um, has never been built in the world. TerraPower, um, was working on building that, and we wanted to build a test core, but in the— in this, starting in 2007, so for— we're 18 years in now, And that whole time, the U.S. government had no way of approving any new reactor technology. The NRC regulates nuclear in the U.S., and my take in those days is that the NRC was kind of an anti-nuclear activist group. We didn't build many reactors of any kind, but certainly no new reactor technology. And, um, that's really sad because This is a reactor that's very— way more efficient than today's reactors. It's unquestionably safe. It can't melt down. It recycles nuclear waste. There's nothing not to like about it. We weren't allowed to build it. Um, the story I put in the book, which is, uh, um, not quite apocryphal but undocumented, let's say— we asked the NRC and the Department of Energy to help us get it approved to build a test core. They told us the guy who does that retired like 7 years ago. We have no way of approving any new reactor technology. And they told us to take it to Russia or China and see if we could do it there. So this is, you know, 2010, '11, '12, somewhere around there. And, um, and we did. So we got a deal with Xi Jinping to build a reactor core in China. This all— this part is documented. Um, TerraPower worked on it for a few years, and then Trump won, trade war killed it. So that was the state of nuclear reactors. And all those years from 2000, probably 9 or 10 to today, I've been trying to beat people over the head about nuclear reactors and show them what the TerraPower reactor could do and show them why it's better and show them why we should build it and get people excited about it. And most of my— that whole time, people just kind of would nod along and be like, yeah, Pablo's crazy. Good luck with that. The last year, no one argues with me anymore. Everybody's like nodding along, oh yeah, totally, for sure, reactors, let's do it. So something— so I think there's this— a couple things have changed around reactors. When we were kids, the world conflated a nuclear reactor with a nuclear bomb, and then we outlawed the wrong one. And if we had done it the other way around, you never would have heard of global warming. So That's what's possible. But we live on the wrong fork in history, and we're still not being honest with ourselves about that. And so, you know, sometimes when you get this— because we're such story-powered creatures, you get the wrong story in your head. Well, then you have to course correct, and that could take generations. My daughter thinks Chernobyl is a TV show for old people.

Yeah. So we did have— we had Fukushima, you know.

How many people died from Fukushima?

True. Although major national, you know, yeah, it's a story. Story. You got the story and, and seem to— because I've noticed the same thing. I mean, part of this, I guess, is, is the administration that's, that's taken over is a little more willing to do some of these. But I think it's the bigger the— it's like, why has the public—

I'll give you a couple of things in our lifetime. So one, I think you got to wait out generations to course correct on a story. We're— I think we're at that point now where we can do it.

Also, Chernobyl was like a hit show, man.

I mean, it's a hit show for old people. Yeah, but then— but our kids are going to tell us off. Yeah, what? Dad, you suck. We should be building reactors to save the environment. Like, that's literally what they believe now, and it's awesome. Um, the bigger driver is that in our lifetime, the biggest industry was oil. Who do you think staffed Congress? In the '80s and the '90s and the 2000s? Well, that was probably Shell and Chevron. Like, these are the biggest companies. They had the most money, the most to gain. Now, biggest industry is hyperscalers. And to power all those chips they got from NVIDIA, they're going to need nuclear reactors. So— and they also learned their lesson of trying to ignore DC for decades. That didn't work. Microsoft learned it early. The rest have learned since. You can't ignore what's happening in D.C. So now they're engaged and they're making it happen. So in the last year, the Congress has flipped. Most bipartisan bill ever, I think, was the Advance Act passed last year to push for making nuclear reactors in this country. The NRC is completely overhauled. They're being super supportive. They're helping get reactors out the door. We have national labs all over the U.S. that have lots of talent, lots of engineers, people who've been doing R&D on nuclear even through the dark ages, and they're ready to go. So we can do it. And then, of course, in the last month, Trump signed a bunch of executive orders to free up nuclear reactors. We have a company because of the TerraPower scar tissue. I don't work on advanced reactors anymore, but what we do have ability to approve are what are called pressurized water reactors. So traditional reactors, all the ones we have in the country right now are called pressurized water reactors. And we have this company that made a design for a small one, and it'll fit through a manhole.

Which company?

It's called DeepFission.

Okay.

And DeepFission's reactor, they bury it a mile deep in a borehole.

Oh, these are the guys out in Berkeley.

They're in Berkeley.

Oh, I've written about them.

Yeah, good. Okay, good. Yeah. So they're kicking ass. So I'll tell you, as of yesterday, I think it was yesterday, this week. So DeepFission was on a track to, on a fast track to build, design, and get approved a reactor core in 2 years, then go build it, a test core for a year or so, and then go into commercial production after that.

Didn't they want to start out just burying waste? Weren't they?

They did that. That's a different company. Same team started a different company called Deep Isolation.

Ah, this is why.

And they bury— they bury waste underground. It's totally safe.

Fracking technology.

Yeah. Drilling.

Yeah. Underground. Okay, this is why. Okay, so I've written about Deep Isolation.

Okay, cool. And so now they eventually they figured out, oh, let's just put the whole reactor down there. And they've worked that out. So that whole timeline of like 4 years to commercialize, the U.S. government is pushing them to do it in 1. They have already this week approved them to do it in 1.

That's okay. Yeah.

So what commercialization?

They were stuck in neutral.

Not— not— these guys are not in neutral. No, no, no.

But I mean, yeah, go back.

That took them a while.

Yeah.

This— the whole world has flipped. We are doing nuclear reactors for real now.

Yeah.

So in one year, they'll have a reactor deployed to prove it all works. This is an unquestionably safe reactor. It's a mile from anyone's backyard. There's 10 billion tons of rock between the reactor and anybody. No radioactivity can get to the surface like this. This is the fastest, cheapest, best idea for how to deploy nuclear reactors I've ever seen. Now, after they build that one, we build a fucking Gigafactory. Make thousands of them and deploy them. You could put them under a data center, under a skyscraper, under a neighborhood, anywhere in the world. That's what is coming, and we are going to do that, and it's going to make the world so much better because we have not delivered enough energy for all the people that we made on this planet. Yeah, I want to solve that.

Okay, and if people are interested, we did a whole episode as well with, uh, Standard Nuclear, which is— oh cool— using this TRISO fuel. Yeah, or producing triso.

That's another cool idea. And, and there are a bunch of folks doing different— I'm not gonna shoot holes in anybody's reactor design here because I think we need a thousand silver bullets, and I hope they all succeed. Triso is really cool. That's a different kind of way of fueling a reactor that's also very safe, but it's advanced, and we have to figure out how to get it approved. And maybe we will because the NRC is helpful now.

But so you're talking You're talking about the AI companies having this huge demand for these data centers. They're having a lot of sway. Now we can see what China's doing on the energy front. For sure. Like marching far ahead of the US if we don't do stuff like this. However, early in our chat, you also— I wanted to go back on one comment because you said something about the AI industry is about to face its own kind of dot-com bubble. Okay, well, I was something to that effect.

Again, AI industry is not a very nuanced term, but we have a lot of companies that are raising a lot of money. And when you— and you have to understand the, the lifecycle of capital, like that money comes with strings attached. You know, investors don't just hand out money for fun. They're doing it because they want a return. They want that money back. They want more back than they gave out. And the reason is they needed to invest in the next things that are coming. So, um, you know, right now AI companies have raised so much money that a couple things have happened. One, they've drawn a lot of capital. They sucked the capital out that would have been available for other things, so nothing else gets funded right now, which is a difficult problem for a lot of other things. The second thing is You know, if you've raised $100 billion, well, your investors want a trillion back. Nobody's ever returned a trillion dollars on a venture investment in all of human history. So where's that money? You know, maybe they'll be happy with only half a trillion, but you know, so where's that money going to come from? Divide half a trillion by however many people there are on Earth and how much money a month you got to get charged from them and then cut out the ones that don't have any money. And you're looking at, you know, you're going to have to start spending your electricity bill or your auto mortgage on AI stuff. Pretty soon you have to spend your house mortgage on AI stuff in order to justify the amount of capital deployed to do this. So there is a bit of a mismatch here, and that sets you up for a bubble. I think these bubbles are important. They're necessary in a way.. And hopefully we are good stewards of all the computational capacity we're building with that money. At least it's going into building computational capacity instead of just buying ads on Instagram. But we need that. We need to make good use of that. And it's very speculative. We don't know if we're going to make this stuff useful enough to justify the investment fast enough to stave off the bubble. So, look, I'm not trying to predict the future here, but that If you don't understand those dynamics at least as well as I do, you probably should not be trying to make investments in this space.

And in the book you do write about things like we talked about TerraPower. You address some AI things. You talk about putting things like solar panels in space. I mean, some of these, these big ideas, the— like you, I have been chasing things like that for many, many years. However, in the last couple years, even the New York Times is writing about deep tech now. I know. So, okay, is this good or bad for you? So you've written this whole book about this career you've dedicated towards this and a whole bunch of new ideas that you think can solve big problems. However, the world is in some ways swung towards your thinking, which I think is good. But do you feel that this takes some of the wind out of your clarion call to action?

I'm not actually just trying to be, you know, unique and weird. I'm just— I've always been focused on what's technically possible. That's kind of my North Star. And then what do we got to do to bring those things to life so they can, you know, fulfill on their potential? Um, I've been frustrated because, look, nobody loves software more than me. I told you, my best friend from childhood is hexadecimal, or you know, whatever. Uh, so I think there's a, um, you know, it's not that I'm down on computers, it's just that I think we've been aiming them in the wrong, you know, not the wrong things, but like pretty low targets. So I don't think I'm going to run out of excitement for, for deep tech. I mean, there's, there, it's most of what's going on in the world is stuff that deep tech can affect. You know, in the book, the way I describe it is, you know, I added up all the Revenues of all the software companies in the world. So that's, you know, Microsoft, Meta, Facebook, everybody combined total revenue is about $2 trillion a year. And if you add in all the hardware, so Nvidia and Intel and everybody else and services or whatever, you can maybe get to $5 trillion. So the entire tech industry that's in the news every day, they're all wound up about our biggest companies. Is about, uh, maybe $5 trillion. Global GDP is over $100 trillion a year. So that other 95% remains completely untouched by Silicon Valley. You know, that's energy, which we've talked about. It's shipping, food, construction, manufacturing, sanitation. Like, these are trillion-dollar industries, multi-trillion-dollar industries, all of them. And Silicon Valley has been turning a blind eye to them. So all the investors in Silicon Valley, these are the people who are supposed to be investing in technologies that bring disruption. What are they doing? They're disrupting Yellow Cab. What about disrupting General Electric, General Motors, General Mills, General Dynamics? Let's go, let's go after the big industries, bring the superpowers we get from new technologies, but go after the big opportunities. All these investors, they measure TAM. If you're investing in Zoom or Slack, you might be happy with a TAM. TAM means total addressable market, market of like tens of billions. Amazing. You know, we got a company making cargo ships that are autonomous and they're sailing, so they don't need fuel.

I've seen these guys. What's their name?

Laid-On Robotics.

Okay.

Small group. Just amazing idea.

Where are they?

In Seattle.

Okay.

And these guys have all the tech working to make a boat sail itself across the ocean. But the day that— right, it sounds like crazy tech. It's, it's the lowest tech thing we do. But that— the day that first ship sails, there's no technical risk anymore. Like, it's moving containers. Anybody who can move containers can get paid to do it. That's a $2 trillion industry. It's as big as software, just shipping alone. Getting Happy Meal toys from China to Los Angeles. Okay, the day that ship sails, no more technical risk. There was never any market risk. I've got a $2 trillion industry. So do I sell that to Maersk, or do we build the next Maersk? Do— and when you look at the history of successes in Silicon Valley, one of the things we learned, we don't fix industries, we replace them with startups. Uber replaced the taxi industry with a startup. Airbnb replaced hospitality, essentially, with a startup. Facebook replaced media with a startup. This is what we're doing. So why would we go after those piddly little industries? Let's go after the big ones. That's deep tech. That's what I'm trying to convey to the— so one, if you're an investor, I think you're missing out if you're not aimed at the bigger problems in the world. That's what we mean here. If you are a founder, you're missing out. You could be building something. Look, nerds all want to build cool shit. They want to build robots and reactors and rockets like I do, right? They're just busy building, you know, spam filters because that's where the money was. But now the money's in everything else. And then 3, so, and I know what I think is like, if you're just working in your career like, why would you build those things when you could go build cool shit? So that's what I'm trying to convince people of with the book. It's like, hey, you could also build cool stuff.

Yeah, this is— I've been beating some of these drums. In 2012, I wrote a story, quoted this guy Jeff Hammerbacher, who had left Facebook. Yeah, because he was so pissed that his life had ended up being like an ad algorithm designer. And he said, you know, he borrowed this Allen Ginsberg quote and said something about like the best minds of my generation are trying to make ads on the internet. And it was always as polarizing as he has become. It was kind of the thing that I liked about Elon when I did the book was that he was— he was rising up during that, that moment when Silicon Valley had swung so hard towards SaaS software and— yeah, and, and consumer stuff and was making machines and he was doing it in California. No, last week we were told you definitely couldn't make stuff in America and for sure couldn't do it in California. And I remember I went to LA and walked into the SpaceX factory for the first time. First of all, I totally expected people to say it was in LA and I'm like, oh, it must be, you know, out near Mojave or something because you can't have a rocket factory like in the city. In the city. And then no, it's like 5 minutes from LAX. Yeah. And then, yeah, I'd expected to see like one rocket and now there were thousands of people working on stacks of these things. And so, yeah, that's when I kind of got excited.

Cool. So and, and yeah, you could think of like, I mean, I don't know Elon's story, but like, I think, you know, we just kind of graduated from software early. Now we got into it early and we got through it and then we moved on to other things. And I think we're at a point now where this whole generation of what we think of as software nerds, we need them. To come help us build these other things.

Yeah, it's weird. When I, when I was a cub, cub baby reporter, semiconductor companies were still a thing. Yeah, I was— I remember I was in this moment where a lot of money got spent on— you had these great computer companies, you had Sun Microsystems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and they all designed every part of the computer, the chip, the storage system, the file system, the operating system, the networking. And it was expensive, but that's, that's how you, you got a difference and that's how you showed you knew what you were doing. And back then everyone was looking for the next big chip. And so they would all spend tons. Semiconductor companies were like the height of like what a VC would fund because you knew, yeah, it'd be a minimum 5, 6 years before you see the first product. It's going to cost millions to billions of dollars to get that first one out. And then I remember the day all that stuff started to dry up. Intel had just kind of like won everything and And, and that's when I felt things turn. It was like, it was like, okay, well, we're not doing that anymore.

Yeah.

And, and software has started to like get into everything. And so we're, you know, we're going to chase this easy, easier money.

You, you find out, you know, software, you know, that's okay. We had to do it, but let's not fool ourselves. That's not where, you know, that's not the end.

Yeah. It's hilarious to me now. There's so many chip startups because Everyone's trying to figure out this, this AI piece.

It's actually— that's a really— you know, we've done a few things in that space, you know, advanced semiconductor lithography, new algorithms, new chip architectures. And there's very few investors. You know, it's a worrisome thing because it's, you know, the demand for higher performance compute is at a fever pitch, but there's so few investors even in Silicon Valley who will invest anything to do with silicon.

Yeah.

Or its successors.

Well, I feel like we've lost some of that.

A lot of it. Yeah.

The talent, you know, people who could even assess that. So when you— you're talking earlier about and about these— this network that you have and scouring the world for inventors. And, you know, if I, if I think about over the last 10 or 12 years, There are certain VCs that come to mind, like Lux Founders Fund. Yeah. Someone like Steve Jurvetson. I mean, there's people who I know have been Playground Global where I'm— we're sitting in. Yeah.

In their office right now.

You know, pretty famous for this.

Their playground.

Yeah. Famous for investing in deep tech type things.

How is what you do or the people you find Yeah, different to how those guys all run pretty big funds at this point, so they can't practically do what I do. I mean, no, not that I would expect them or anyone else to because it's kind of, kind of wild ride. But, um, I'm a feeder for them, so I'll be the guy who invests the first check coming out of a lab and into a startup. And at that stage, you know, we're looking at you know, half-written patent, wires sticking out of metal, you know, DeLorean on blocks. Um, it's kind of a mess. The team's not complete. That's really where we kick in because we're just focused on the technology itself. I'm there to figure out, is this tech real? Can it be a big, you know, force multiplier? Um, and then get it shaped up, you know, so that other venture investors could come in And they're very important. We need them. All our companies need an investor like a Playground or a Lux or someone like that to come in and help them. You know, those firms will do much fewer deals. They'll put in more capital than we can. They'll sit on the board. They'll, you know, they'll know the whole industry. They'll see all the deals in that industry and pick the winners. So we really, you know, those guys are all very important and it's so, part of the reason we are at this inflection point is that they've pioneered building a deep tech venture ecosystem and they've been successful enough that they can do that kind of thing. So we, we do hundreds of these things. We do a lot of them. And so we're a feeder for those guys.

How do you people— I know when you worked at iV, I mean, you guys literally had like databases of inventors. And I imagine you spent years running around the world meeting all these people. Is that the net effect is that you've just built up like, how are these people finding you?

Finding you? Yeah, well, the—

or you're finding them?

Yeah, you kind of can't find them. Um, if you think about my founders, you know, they're very heads down in a lab or a garage. They're doing their thing. They're not going to TED conference or whatever. So, um, you got to make them find you. And so my, you know, because I got an early start and partly because of the public speaking and, and because of the work at Blue Origin and Lab. People know me for working on these kinds of crazy projects, and I've gotten to do a lot of the things these founders want to do. And so I, you know, I try to make myself available to them. I'm not, I'm not available to everyone else, but to, to those inventors, I make myself available to them. And I want them to know to call me, you know, I want to be the first call when they have something that is ready to get on a commercial track. You know, we can't invest in research projects, but when they have an invention that's like, all right, the science works, now let's figure out how to make a company, and then I can help with that. And we can often invest earlier than anyone. So that's what I focus on and why— and I stay focused on that, and it's the only thing I do because, um, because hardly anybody else could do that, and I can just because of having worked on so many technologies, largely at the lab, and then because of that crazy network of, you know, of folks who can help me. And, and so I think it's very important for me to do the thing that only I can do. So we do that.

Yeah. Okay. Well, you've been so generous with your time. I have one last— yeah, one last question. I also feel like we only scratched the surface.

That's always crazy. I mean, there's so much there.

We could have just spent—

we'll do it again next time.

Yeah, we could have spent 2 or 3 hours, I'm sure, just on IV or something like that alone. I've never seen a dedication like this in a book. Oh yeah, it says, "For Blake, will you marry me? Without you, my future wouldn't be very deep at all." Is this, is this, is this legit? What is this?

So my girlfriend and I've been together about 5 years. I'd been planning to propose, but, you know, there were a lot of constraints on this proposal, like it had to be, with friends, you know, with cameras when her hair was done, her nails were done, you know, like we just kind of like a lot of constraints. And so I needed a cover story for the proposal. And so I put the proposal in the book, but that's like months and months before it publishes.

This is, this is what I was trying to figure out was the order of operations.

It's a really over-engineered proposal. So I, So I put it in the book, but then I had to tear that page out of all the preview copies and make sure nobody saw it. And I couldn't let her see the book. And then when we had, we had a kind of a launch party for the book with friends in New York at the World Trade Center. And, um, and so I talk about the book and share, you know, take questions for like an hour. And then I'm, and I said to her, hey, um, come on stage. There's a part of the book I, I wanted I said, for you to read and told her to open it up and read the first thing you see. And so she read that and that was in front of all our friends and that was proposal. And she, and she did say yes. So now we're engaged.

Okay.

Well, she said yes. And the whole surprise worked out, but it was dicey for a while.

Congratulations. Has anyone, is that a first?

I, I don't know.

I don't know. Probably not, but, um, all right. Well, we'll show the book. Awesome. One more time.

And it's, I think I would say like, hopefully people get the idea. You don't need a PhD to read this book. It's a soulful book. I wrote every word myself. I mean, I think that, you know, if you read it and don't like it, I'll give you your money back. Like, it's a—

well, you— I mean, you clearly, you have a voice, you have a distinct writing style.

You—

I'll say this, um, okay, and then, sorry, for people who, who aren't watching, it's again, it's called Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. Um, and you've got a really distinctive writing style. It's, it's fast-paced. It is It's cool, the ground that you cover in this book, you will learn, you'll learn quite a bit about different areas and, and no bullshit. I mean, your writing style is just really engaging and extraordinarily clear.

I read the audiobook too.

Did you?

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

He's very—

I've never done that. Everyone tells me I should.

Yeah, you got to do it.

But yeah, but by the time I finish a book, it's like I can— I'm so sick of it.

Yeah, I get it. The thought of doing that is is, um, yeah, you write different kinds of books, so maybe you don't have to, but wait, I lied.

I have one more question for you because I marked this. There were a couple, there were a few things I marked. I know in my head we've gotten most of them, but you wrote, you wrote, uh, the future of technology is going to be global. We're going to diffuse technology advancement out of Silicon Valley around the world. But if we're being honest, which we usually aren't, most of the world has no chance of competing. Why Silicon Valley has all the money. VCs are elitist assholes who just want to invest with their old frat buddies. The tech all comes from Stanford. There's a bit of truth in those statements, but they are mostly used as excuses. A little bit later, you kind of get into Israel and how, how, how it has done. It definitely has like a, a mini Silicon Valley or, or, you know, and I agree. With you. I think Shenzhen probably, um, in there too. But so yeah, tell me this, tell— just tell me your thoughts on, on Silicon Valley's place in the world as technology seems to be getting better everywhere, and especially as, as China on many fronts seems to be outpacing the Valley from what I can see.

So the beautiful thing about Silicon Valley, and again, I don't, I don't live here now, um, But I think the Silicon Valley that I come from is what we— is the, you know, big Silicon Valley in the sky that we have in our minds. And what was great about it for me is that I remember when I was— when I lived here, I could just go flag down a barista or a homeless guy on the street and tell him a crazy idea about, you know, putting solar farms in space. And what would happen 100% of the time, no matter who you're talking to, is like, oh, cool, man. My buddy might be able to help. My, you know, uncle might be able to invest. My old, you know, roommate might be able to work on the team. You know, everybody's in on the game in those days at least. And to some extent, that's true now, and especially wherever the hype cycle is, like in AI, that's true right now. Everybody here is trying to help each other out. They're calibrating against what other founders are doing. There's a support system. And I personally have had the experience when I had a startup fail, the next day my investor is calling to find out not what happened to his money, but what I'm doing next. Imagining that happening anywhere else in the world is almost impossible. You know, and, and some places in Europe, if you have a startup fail, they'll open a criminal investigation to find out how you fucked up with the money. So it's a different cultural vibe. I don't know how to change those cultures to be like Silicon Valley. I'm not optimistic about that. I think you got to play to your strengths. And so, um, Silicon Valley has a very important thing to learn from. What I see that I think is a bad idea is to try to emulate Silicon Valley without being competitive. If you're going to try and beat us at our own game, you need to be honest with yourself about how good we are at it here, and then figure out how you're going to do better. And I think that's a good way to think about everything. If you're pissed off about Elon and SpaceX or whatever, then no problem. But instead of just bitching about it on Threads, go build a better SpaceX. Show us how. That's what the world needs to do. So I think there's a, there's a problem right now. And you could say in some ways I think Israel did succeed at that with tech startups. Shenzhen has succeeded that in a different, I'd say, different cross-section of skills, but they've definitely blown us away. I think we live in a world where we all grew up, you know, thinking China was copying everything we did, and we were right. But we should probably now be much more concerned about how we're going to copy China, because they're kicking our ass at so many things, and we need to step up. We need to play that major league game. So I think what I'm trying to do in the book with my comments about Silicon Valley is antagonize people to be honest with themselves about what we did that worked. If you think that we did things that suck, which is lots of things that we did that suck, no problem, show us how to do better. That should be everybody's MO, you know, look around the world, see who's doing the best, and then do better. And we aren't doing a good job of that in a lot of cases. We're not. And we're not being honest with ourselves about it. And then outside the U.S., I think people are not being honest with themselves about what works in Silicon Valley that they could or should emulate. And so, you know, what I don't like seeing is people— I've been all over the world and I've been to the Silicon Valleys of Europe and Latin America and all over, and I just see a lot of cosplay. And that's not good enough. So I want them to either do one of two things. Figure out how you're going to kick our ass, which I'm— I'll help. Like, that's, that's what needs to get done. Yes, Silicon Valley sucks in a bunch of ways. We need to do better. If you want to take that on, I'll help. That's cool. Or figure out what you can do that we suck at and lean into that. So for example, I think the winning strategy is like probably invent something in, in Israel, make a prototype send it to Germany to be engineered, send it to China to be manufactured, send it to the US to be marketed. Something like that is a winning roadmap, you know, because— and, and, and these cultures, these places should get— figure out what are we going to be good at, what, what plays to our strengths. And they all have amazing— you travel everywhere I go, I mean, there's amazing things about these cultures, things that I know we suck at. I think all south of the equator, Latin America and Africa— I mean, these places are amazing because you know what they have that we don't? Proximity to problems. You know, they have the front row seat to the problems that billions of people have. All of those problems we have solved for rich people here, so we don't get to see them. We aren't trying to solve them. We're missing out. Those are going to be the places— they have proximity problems, they'll probably figure out the solutions. So now they need to figure out how do they use the machinery of startups and venture to get the new technologies to life and scale them quickly and all that. So there's work to do there. So I just think, I'm not complaining about anybody in particular, but I think a lot of people are operating on these sort of cartoon notions of what different cultures are like. And that might be the culture of Silicon Valley or the culture of Saudi Arabia or the culture of You know, what's going on in Germany. So, you know, the cartoon version doesn't help you very much. So get a real version of what's going on and figure out what you're going to be good at and, and go for it. That's what we need.

As someone who makes a technology travel show, I could not agree more with like, like almost, I think probably everything you said. I have similar experiences and thoughts.

Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Cool.

You were far more eloquent.

That's all right.

On them than I am. All right, man. Well, I've taken up a ton of your time. Thank you so much for coming in.

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm excited about this and what you're doing, and hopefully we get a whole lot more of stuff for you to cover. I mean, that's where it's coming.

Keep it coming. Yeah. So, yeah, all those— all you inventors reaching out to Pablo's, when you, you know, don't be shy, reach out to me too.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Well, I can, you know, I can get them started and then when they've got something to show show, I'll send them back to you.

There we go. There we go. Um, all right, man. Thanks so much.

Yep. Thank you.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer and Jon Sortland, and the show is edited by the Jon Sortland. Thanks as always. To Brex and E1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack, YouTube, and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks, y'all.