YouSaid · the spoken record

Pablos Holman

lines on the record: 174
first: 2025-09-16
most recent: 2025-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I have deepfuture.tech is our website. There's a podcast there, which is mostly just long conversations with nerds. That's how I learn. So I pick the brains of nerds and I record some of them. And then I'm on all the stuff. Like, you know, I'm Pablos on X, but nobody listens to me there. I'm LinkedIn, more people listen. So you could do those things. Oh, I have a really good, I have probably the best email list in the world because the only things I send out are super inspiring and amazing technology. So join that or”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personal growth like every other podcast host probably does. I believe in do the thing you're good at, hire friends or people who are good at the things you suck at. So what I don't know how to do is scale up on co-founder dating for Deep Tech. I want that solved desperately. There are more entrepreneurs than there are inventors. I got the thing that's precious here, but I want to figure out how do I get them to party with the entrepreneurs and team up. I don't know how to scale that, but I really want to.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, I think we have a fucked up mythology in Silicon Valley. We imagine this amazing smart person who invented something and then became a patent lawyer and patented it, wrote the code to launch the first version, and then hired the genius team and then chose an HR policy and took the company public. Like that is not actually what's going on. It's always teams. And we might have the quarterback out in front that is the focal point that the whole world looks at and says, oh, that's the founder and that's the one that you see on YouTube. But that is a person who is doing an important job of being the human face for a company, but there's a team behind them. And so as a founder, I think you got to find the people who are good at things you suck at. My founders often suck at marketing. They suck at business development. And that's okay. You can suck at that. I don't need you to be good at that. I don't believe in.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every other VC will tell you we back the best founders. That's their mantra. And I get it. And increasingly, I'm sympathetic. You know, I have backed founders who I, because I love the tech, but they just spent their career on the tech. They're only making a business because it's the next logical step.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the heart of what you're getting at one thing worth articulating here is like I attract those technical founders, those inventors, a lot of the time I can't invest. And the reason is I love the technology, but there's no entrepreneur. There's no commercial animal. There's nobody who can sell some shit. And a lot of times the homework I have to give them is go find a frat buddy or a cousin or a roommate or somebody who can sell something because you need that to build a business. And I can only take a few bets where I don't see that, hoping that it's going to come later.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'm along for that ride. I'm going to get it wrong sometimes. But if that works, the upside is fucking utopia. We're going to do a few of those, and we have a few.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, these guys have figured out a very simple way to cause fusion by putting deuterium together with carbon nanotubes that cause effusion. And if it works, it'll be fucking amazing. There is work to do to prove it. Got it working in the lab, but they're working on advancing that now. NASA has done the same kind of fusion using metal lattices. So this is a very fringe area and fusion probably any physicist you know will tell you that Pablos is full of shit which is fine but that's the kind of you know wild ideas that we think are worth pursuing if we can and so there's a important inflection point there where we were able to see this works in the lab can we commercialize it is also a”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of these fusion projects are very expensive to do research on. They've figured out it's hard to get that money from academic research financing. They're trying to co-opt venture capital to do it. So I think a lot of these teams are overstating what they can do, how fast they can do it, because they're trying to attract that capital. And I think they're being a little disingenuous about it. I'm not going to name names. And the problem with that is it poisons the well for the people who do have something that could work. So you got to be very careful about whether you think it's going to map to that 10-year venture time horizon. I have seen a lot of the fusion companies. I have an evaluate all of them. I've not invested in any of the plasma fusion companies. I will tell you, because I am a crazy venture capitalist who invests in wild ideas, I did invest in one. And it's called nanoconfinement fusion.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one has ever actually achieved that if you count the entire energy for the system. There are projects, and once in a while you see Fusion Headlines where it's like, you know, fusion works from Livermore or whatever. And what they've done is on system level one, which basically means the energy going into the fusion from like the 192 giant lasers is less than the energy coming out of the fusion, but they're not counting the energy going into the lasers. And the problem with all this, the reason I'm explaining is so people can understand”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can source it from the moon. So there are people who want to go to the moon and grab tritium and bring it back. The stuff in gun sites, there's very little of it left. Tritium paint and in your old Swiss watches and things. That's why they glow. You need tritium. But anyway, the point of all this is to say. In the best case scenario, fusion is very difficult. I really hope we get it. The upside of that is once it really does work, you'll get more energy out than you put in. So think of like a gas tank. You have to fill once and it runs the rest of your life.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now they got that working. We're out of the science risk window into the technical risk window, which means can they engineer a fusion reactor? So I'd say Commonwealth is probably the most well-funded, most advanced plasma fusion reactor company. They're building what's called a Togamak, which is like the giant donut shape thing you see pictures of. And I wish them a lot of luck. But they have extreme engineering problems. Like it is really hard to build that thing. And once they get it built, then they're going to need tritium and there's about enough tritium on Earth left to make it go one time. And the only way to make more tritium is you guessed it in a fusion reactor where they've got to get like 99% efficiency on getting the tritium out. We don't know if that's going to be possible. So there's like just a zillion of these really hard engineering problems. So anyway, that's a long source.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the cool thing is a few years ago, the team from MIT called Commonwealth Fusion Systems now published a series of, I think, seven papers that explain exactly how they can make magnetic confinement fusion work. And the real breakthrough was a new superconductor. It's a superconductor that allows them to make the world's most powerful magnet, which they've done. And it's awesome. Crazy cool magnet.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Temperatures that rival the sun because that is what the sun is doing is doing fusion. But what you need that we don't have on earth that the sun has is you need a lot of pressure as well. Now the pressure you could get if you could make a vessel that would hold the plasma, but the plasma is so hot it'd melt anything on earth. So the way we do it now, the best idea so far has been what's called magnetic confinement. you create a giant super magnet and use the magnetic field to push the plasma together and it's far enough away that it won't melt so that's the using the force to do it so that's a super cool idea but it has been very difficult to make it work and scientifically we didn't even really know if it would work and that's why people make fun of fusion all the time and say that it's 20 years away and always will be that changed”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not zero. So here's the thing, as you know, fusion is like rattle these molecules and get them to break apart and get a bunch of energy out. Fusion is that's fusion. Fusion is push these molecules together and get them to become one. Plasma fusion is the biggest branch of fusion research in history. And so what that means is you're going to heat up these molecules so much that they kind of expand and open up to the possibility of getting stuck together.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In one fund we'll do about 60, so we'll do another fund and we'll do another 60 in the future. But yeah, we'll do multiple funds, but we're not, most VCs would kind of like graduate from pre-seed to seed to series A. We don't do that. We just stay.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So the trick there, you know, most, I'm sure you know by now what most investors would do is get a portfolio, try to get a big enough portfolio to offset those failures with hits. And that's the shots on goal game. That's why we do so many. That's why we focus on. Being the first check, doing precede stuff, actual tech, we'll do hundreds of these things. And we're going to hope to get a couple hits.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what people don't realize is that, well, just to make it clear to the audience, when you eat food, you're not feeding yourself. You're feeding a thousand different microbes in your gut. And then what they spit out feeds you. So there's this layer of indirection that we have no measurement for. Mine's different than yours. Everybody's different. We're tuned for different things. And we don't even have a way of understanding that. And so that's microbiome. We're going to learn about it. Every one of those microbes is probably a few PhDs that need to get done. But holobiome is crafting the machinery to do that. The mechanism do that. Yeah. It's exciting because they're figuring out cool stuff already.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the last five years. Wow, cool. Oh, yeah. I know we can cut this out, but you're an investor in holobiome. Yeah, that's one that we did, super cool.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I try to read every email already. I can't reply to all of them. So I don't know the right answer with or without me. I think these are important things to do. We can take on some fraction of things and help out a little bit. I think that what I'm trying to do is convince not just those founders, but also those investors like, hey, you could steer what you're doing to bigger opportunities. Look at Deep Tech. Like you don't have to be a physicist to do it. You could find some important things and some really lucrative things to invest in in deep tech and you won't be competing with all the other usual suspects.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kit that we're going to use to build the future. And you get to add something to that toolkit. So, yeah, I just think if you put that framework to use, you could kind of get a sense of like where technology can go and get a lot more excited about it. It's really sad for me to see people that are pissed off about technology in general or even pissed off about their phones or whatever. I'm like, yeah, okay, well, what are you using it for? You know, are you just doom scrolling? Because we could do a lot better than that. And so I think that's if I had a chance to like try and share something, it would be that like there's a lot left to do.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just wondering if anything You know, I guess the thing I maybe alluded to but didn't articulate very well is that you could see how I kind of in my career I got the software out of my system young because I got early start and then maybe by 2001 or something I was able to sort of say okay did all this stuff with computers but maybe I could go beyond that and bring other technologies to life And when I look at Silicon Valley, I see a lot of people who might want to do that, they got to do the software stuff, they're maybe 10 or 20 years into their career now. And so maybe we can win some of them over and help us come bring these other technologies to life. Like I described, I think the opportunities are bigger, the impact is bigger. And why would you want to do that? Well, I think there's a meaning in it. There's an opportunity here to see technology as a force for good to make the world better. We build this tool.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do it less. I want to. COVID kind of damaged this also scene. It's mostly back, but I don't have a salsa community anymore. And the problem with that is, it takes me a while to sort of brainwash my partners into doing the thing I want to do. You got to find a certain special kind of partner that can hang in there for that. What I do, because I travel so much and I dance salsa everywhere I go. It's kind of like the first conversation when you meet somebody, it's like, what do you do? Where do you work? Where'd you grow up? I have that conversation, the dancer. And I was able to have fun for a long time, but now it's really hard for me to have fun unless I have a pretty rarefied partner that will put up with my flavor of bullshit. Yeah. It's an evolution”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I live in the epicenter of salsa, but they dance what's called mambo. They can see me coming from miles away. I'm like an invasive species. They're like, oh my God, what is this? Trash, you know, so I'm having a hard time. I have to now reorient, and it's just a minor change in how you do the timing. And it's actually super cool, but man, I just, you know, I have to somehow whitewash myself of this, the filth from the West Coast also seems.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why I say it's important to do. It's humbling even now. I mean, I've been dancing for 20 years. But if I show up, you know, they'll be incompatible dancers. And my problem is, so I'm training what's called essentially like LA style, West Coast salsa. Salsa actually comes from New York City. New York City.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I got very fast music. The steps are fast and there's a lot of spinning and shit. And so I'll close in partners' eyes because I can lead her. She doesn't need her eyes because I'm leading everything. I'm tracking every moving object in the room. I'm putting her feet where they go. And so you can sometimes, especially for some dancer, especially if they're uptight, because a lot of salsa dancers will train for the stage. So they'll train choreography and all this crap. And I'm trying to get them out of that mindset so I can get her eyes closed and I can, even, and you won't know. She can spin with her eyes closed.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, it was the exact same thing because I went to this Argentine steakhouse and there was these pros direct from Argentina that danced between the tables and up on the bar. And I saw he's leading her, but the communication was so subtle, I realized that's what Aikidoka are trying to do. And they're better at it”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I became dangerous because then I could just play. And salsa, you get a different partner for every song. So you go out at night, you dance with a different girl every night, and it's a different track. It's a different girl. It's a different, and you're just making it up and you're leading. So I could just play and play and try things and see what works. So I have like this vocabulary of like bizarre salsa moves that I can do with a partner who's never learned those moves because I'm leading her through it. And I know what I'm, I can feel it all. So that's what happened to me. And that's pretty heterodox, but that's what I meant.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in salsa, the first year and a half, you're in class, you're being shown a move, you're learning the move, you're learning the basics, you're learning the timing, learning the steps. You have to do that. There's just no way getting out. It's excruciating for me because I kind of suck at that. But the day I got through that and what that meant for me was like the day I could get out of anything I could get myself into. Because in Salsa, you're like turning a girl into a pretzel and then untying her at like 180 miles an hour. Once I realized, okay, I know how to get out of every possible thing that I can get into.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saul says everywhere. And the reason I defected from Tango, I tried to do Tango first for like a month, but it takes advantage of none of my natural talents. You can't do reverse engineering in Tango. It's too structured and disciplined and minute. And I just, and Salsa, you can just wiggle your way through it.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of life. I'm not a rock star in salsa. I get outranked by the Mexican dishwasher every night. It's good for my ego because I'm at the bottom always. And I think that's good for me. And you learn something. My way of moving through the world is so heavily affected by Aikido and Salsa. So anyway, I've been doing that for a long time.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The air with karate and stuff before that. And it just didn't land for me. With Aikido, you always have a partner. And so they're attacking you. And without words, you're trying to communicate that you want them to shove their head in the ground or something like that. And I love that. You know, I love that feeling of physical communication. And I'm not great at Aikido and I was trying to learn that through reverse engineering as well, which also has unorthodox problems. Eventually short version of the story is I figured out that it was an upgrade to train instead of with sweaty old Japanese guys, sweaty young Latin girls. So I'm still basically doing the same thing as Aikido, but in salsa, and I can do it any night, anywhere in the world. There's salsa dancers. You just got to know where to find them. You don't need to speak the language. And so I got a lot out of dancing salsa. I got a community of people in all walks.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be fair to my partners, I should say that because I don't dance like everyone else. And I can't learn to dance like someone else. I have to try this stuff and then converge on what works. That's a really great thing, but I, you know, so I dance differently than ever else. But yeah, salsa for me was very important because partly because too much of my life was hanging out with hackers who fit a demographic that's like a little too homogeneous in its way, maybe not intellectually, but certainly by all other metrics. So I had trained in Aikido for like a decade, which is Japanese martial art, very structured, very disciplined, very traditional. I'm obsessed with the physical communication. I love that part of it. And what's cool about Aikido is you always train with a partner. And that's not true for a lot of martial arts. I'd done a lot of punching and kicking.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it is important to me. Actually, it's so I remember the tango thing that you did that I read about. And you and I have a radically different relationship to dance. I can't do things that are choreographed. I can't memorize things. I can't focus on like a structured plan for learning something like you do. All reverse engineering. So when I show up to salsa, What I'm doing is, yeah, there's a teacher and they're showing me a thing I'm supposed to learn. I have to try everything and throw out the stuff that doesn't work. That's literally how I learned to dance. So I'm a really good salsa dancer now because I started 20 years ago, but very unorthodox”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I still need help and I need to deputize my friends. There's probably like VCs hanging out at Starbucks by MIT, but those professors call me when they have something that their postdocs want to spin out. And I'm like, yes, that's the help I need because I can't hang out at every lab. I go and I visit and I try to be helpful. Some of its labs about another third is like rogue engineers who are working at some company that's got their head up their ass and not doing the coolest thing. So I like that. And then my favorite third is like the crazy hackers who are in a basement. You just can't find them. They're not going to TED or whatever.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaning, yeah, we're basically helpful at the beginning. We're helpful in the early stages when you got to get out of that garage or get out of that lab and become more maybe venture compatible. We're trying to help people co-opt the machinery of venture capital and aim it at a deep tech. And so if you're kind of on that track, we could maybe be helpful not for everyone, but that's what I'm looking for. And so, yeah, I would love to see these, especially the breakthroughs really early.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honeypot means something else to hackers, so I'll go with like lightning rod You just look for the crazy hair and the DeLorean, and that's how you find them. Yeah, I'd say I attract some of them because I've worked on some of the kinds of projects they want to do. And hopefully they believe that I'll at least hang in there long enough to understand what they're trying to do and maybe believe in it and maybe invest in it. So that's where I'm at. There are times when I find out about a technology or an invention that we might have been really helpful with, but it's too late. That is frustrating”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we can And so are other people there. We can build chip fabs. You don't necessarily need tiny fingers. It's not a lot of bullshit stories we've been told. We can build chip fabs. We can learn to work. But you get the idea. Like let's build some cool shit. And I don't know why you wouldn't want to do that. And we could build ships. We can build chips. We can build all these other things.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We could be a much happier, healthier society if we're doing things where we can see how it helps our world, helps our society. So building stuff is a good example of that because you can build a thing and you can see I built that thing and somebody using it and that's awesome. Like our Tesla factory workers depressed. I don't know or maybe swap out depressed for disgruntled or apathetic or something. You can solve some of these things. I want to see us build. And I think Andrew is an example of like, we're going to build these things that help us. I want to build those ships. We can build ships in the U.S.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you can see how anyone gives a shit about what you do, that's not going to be very healthy. So I think we just need to recalibrate in our society and recognize that like, okay, everybody needs to do something that matters, do something where they can see how it matters. I'm good at connecting dots, so I can do things where I see how it matters in a thousand years, and I'm good. But most people might be better off if they're like a nurse, where you can like see, yeah, I helped that person today. You know, are nurses depressed? They might be depressed about having to do a lot of paperwork, but they're probably not depressed about their work. I don't mean to belittle anyone who's depressed. I'm just saying, as an example.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work, I think we're optimized for work. We're evolved to work. You wonder about why are people depressed? I mean, not everyone. I don't mean to disparage anybody who is dealing with something like that, but you're evolved to be useful to the world around you, to the people around you. And if you can't see how your work is useful, yeah, you're going to get depressed. I mean, I think that happens a lot. I'm not saying it's the only reason, but when you have a whole society that doesn't really do anything”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why can't we do that? Now, one of the criticisms often made of American schools is that they were, the whole structure was invented to make factory workers after the war. Well, now that we need some factory workers, where are they? Like we don't have them. What we've got are like OnlyFans creators. So could some of them maybe help us out in a factory? We need to build a lot of things. And I think if you look around, we're just miscalibrated. You know, you and I barely have to work. You don't know most anybody you know hasn't worked a day in their lives. We're not digging coal out of a mine. We're sitting in front of a laptop wondering when, you know, how long is the line at Starbucks? It's just not even closed. So I think we need to recalibrate on our expectation of what it means to work.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think the nature of ballistic warfare is changing? I think the case Andrel would make is fairly compelling. I think we probably need a lot more and the guy who should weigh in on the geopolitics of Taiwan, but I think it's not hard to look at that and say, all right.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me And that's great for humanity. I mean, it really is. I mean, they should get a Nobel Prize for bringing their country out of extreme poverty. We should probably get one for, you know, I don't know, like making global trade possible with our Navy or something. But, you know, there's also a lot of accolades that I think we're not giving to China that we should.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here is a respect for that engineering mindset, a respect for like you described, putting the dominoes in order, a respect for building thoughtfully, respect for basic arithmetic, a respect for building the future that we want. We need to work on that. China's problem, no respect for me, for the hacker mindset, for the renegade, for the creative person, for the crazy ones. Like they don't make room for that. And it's hurting their ability to do new things. Now, they're kicking ass by just waiting for us to figure shit out and then implementing it faster and better than us. So we've spent most of our life worried about China copying us. We need to figure out how are we going to copy China. And I think that's a wake-up call where we're at right now.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the US. I just think that's the kind of story people need to get in their head just to see that contrast and realize we're not playing in the major leagues in a lot of things. So we need to step up. And I think there's a lot that's impressive about China. I obviously I'm on Alaskan, which is like a supercharged American. So look, I think that there's a lot of dumb shit going on in China that I can't stand. I don't want to live there. I think you got to give them credit for the things that they're good at. The thing that's missing”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are tools to help humans make better decisions. Now, an LLM is the wrong tool for lots of kinds of decisions, but AI overall can be applied to help make better decisions. And that is where we're going. And so when governments figure this out, and it's great to see that some of these countries are leading the charge, when you see a country like the UAE and you see what good leadership can do, it's kind of embarrassing. Democracy needs a little maintenance work. And I'm hoping that this class of tools is going to help us level up and fulfill our potential. So that is where that goes. What I think about it is China has done a great job of a lot of things. And it would be great to have like a Netflix series where like every episode shows something amazing from China that saw”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's a great example of what's happening, obviously, a lot less lawyers were needed to get that job done. When Congress passes a bill, no Congressman has ever read it. Collectively, all the congressmen have not read it. And so the future we're getting to here is one where if you're running a business, we build a computational model of your business now, not an LLM, but still an AI where you can run simulations of your business and you can figure out how to optimize your business. That's all happening right now. If you're in business and not doing this, be terrified because by next year your competitors will be doing this. So I take heart because what I think is it means 100 years from now, governments will do that too.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a couple of major factors, and the insight about the preponderance of lawyers, I think, is huge and really important. So I'm excited about reading that book. The reason we invented LLMs is to put lawyers out of business so we can fix this country. And I think that's going to work. So if you are a parent right now, don't send your kid to school to become a lawyer because we're going to replace all the lawyers with AI. I think where this goes, I'm optimistic. I know I'm taking a side here, but I only have joking about that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could learn a lot about China from you. I've been there some, but probably not as much. I don't speak the language. My way of learning was to start sleeping with a Chinese woman. So I've been doing that for five years. Five years more fun than memorizing characters, frankly. It's helped a ton. I really opened up my eyes to China. So yeah, my fiance is Chinese, but been in America long enough that she'll put up with me. And I think the insight from that book, I haven't read Breakneck yet. It's a relatively new book.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or is that just something? No, I had gone through building 77, and I'm like, hey, go into New Lab, and he just waved me through.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT