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

**Pablos Holman** (0:00)
In the 90s, we were trying to raise the alarm about how insecure computers were, and so we would just try to terrify people by stealing their passwords and credit card numbers and stuff, and I started doing that live on stage.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:15)
I saw it for like a 10-ton, you ended up doing a 10-ton, right?

**Pablos Holman** (0:19)
Oh yeah, yeah, so then what happened, yeah, initially I was just 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.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:59)
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**Ashlee Vance** (1:30)
Today's guest is Pablos Holman. Hello.

**Pablos Holman** (1:33)
Hey, man. Good to see you. I'm rocking.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:35)
Good to see you. I'm going to introduce a bit of your background, and then we'll get to the book.

**Pablos Holman** (1:41)
Sure, whatever works.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:42)
As an author, I always want to get the book in there early. But we just met a little while ago. However, it's not like I ran in your circles. I just know a lot of people.

**Pablos Holman** (1:53)
For sure.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:54)
You know, mostly you did a stint at Intellectual Ventures working with Nathan Myhrvold and I assume Bill Gates is part of that. 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 a lot. So you were in the early, early days of Blue Origin. Then I would say an inventor, a hacker, a renowned public speaker, and you've worked.

**Pablos Holman** (2:27)
Side hustle.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:29)
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.

**Pablos Holman** (2:44)
Less than a month ago. It was a couple of weeks ago.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:47)
Okay. And it says, creating technology, the 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.

**Pablos Holman** (3:01)
And they don't call it out, but they also don't write it.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:04)
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 an easy read on deep tech, on subjects that might be sometimes intimidating.

**Pablos Holman** (3:22)
Yeah, thanks. Well, I'm not trying to be an author, you know, like you're 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 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 a lot of work on, so it's probably a little more unique than lots of other books, but people seem to love that.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:46)
And I thought we'll get into the heart of the book in a second. There is stuff that you write about in here that I was going to get to pretty quick.
But just super quick, I mean, do tell people, what is the thrust? Why did you write this book?

**Pablos Holman** (3:59)
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, you know, 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.