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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“Well, look, I mean, Kevin's a delightful human, you could say, he's dead now, so we don't want to say anything bad about him, but hackers kind of rallied around him because he was one of the first hackers to get thrown in jail. Most hackers, like, I don't know, if you're elite, Kevin is kind of a joke because he was a good social engineer.”
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 actually an amazing long con. Well, my dating life has been very colorful because of every girl who's dating me ends up meeting me at some strange warehouse in the industrial district with wires hanging out of metal.”
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 a beautiful space. It's, I think, a kind of a public private partnership with the city to build this thing. And they've been at this for like a decade. I've been friends with the founders for that whole time and just so impressed with what they've done. I actually don't have anything to do with it. I'm pimping New Lab because if you have a deep tech startup, these folks can help. And I think it would be great to attract more deep tech founders to these things because they built this one and they built one in Detroit that's even bigger. And it's so cool. And it's got space. So if you're trying to build something, go see New Lab. And I thought this would be a cool place to record the podcast because it's cool. And in New York, it's hard to find a cool space that's not tiny.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This place is so cool. So, we are at the new lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And this is like nothing else even I know about. It's actually kind of like the intellectual ventures lab. It's about the same size, maybe a little bigger. There's a machine shop here. There's labs of all different kinds. And it's an incubator for deep tech startups. They have like 100 of them.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People need a community. And we have a WhatsApp group where we sort of stay in touch with each other the rest of the year. And people are very supportive and helpful. And it's just wherever you are, I mean, look, you don't need Mars, but you do need a community. And so one cool thing about Silicon Valley, if you're into, I guess, like right now AI type stuff, you could definitely find a community there. The Deep Tech founders are having a harder time because there's no geographic center of gravity. So we're trying to, at least for our founders, help them get that going. But man, it's.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thankfully, Amazon or Jeff is paying for it, which is great. And we get to cross pollinate these folks who really often are peerless in a sense because they're world-class experts in their thing. You're surrounded by people who are smarter than you. We'll have five or ten Nobel Prize winners and we don't even put them on stage. So it's a rarefied group. And I'm convinced that these things are so important.”
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 just a small event. So, Jeff Bezos has that event annually. It's for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. So Jeff and Amazon organize it. It's a really delightful event because we bring in the world's experts in those four things. And we've been doing that for like a decade. And so it's a way to make a peer group out of people who often are siloed because they're researchers in a lab somewhere. They wouldn't necessarily party together otherwise. And so it's a very important thing. I'm oddly like probably the one person who's worked in all four of those things. Everybody else is usually like a Nobel Prize winner and something. But it's otherwise like a normal conference. We come hang out together for a few days.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For what they're good for and what we can work on together. So, yeah, I'm with you on that. And that's why I can work for people who, I mean, I probably don't agree with everything, people I work with are about. But we need like a thousand Elons. Maybe they don't all need ex accounts, but we need a thousand Elons and we need them to go after all these things. And that's how we're going to build the future.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got a glimpse of this from this thing that a bunch of music artists did called the one campaign, like you two was doing it. And the idea behind the one campaign, because they wanted to solve malaria, they wanted to solve HIV. They wanted to go after some big global scale problems. And the reason it's called one is that they wanted to get all these constituencies from around the world to focus on this problem. And they only had to agree about this one thing. We only have to agree about this one thing, which is that we need to solve HIV. Yeah, we don't agree about all this other stuff. We don't even like the same music. We need the Republicans and the Democrats and the autocrats all together for this one thing. That had a big impression on me because I think it is important, like we don't all agree about everything. I'm a cipherpunk. We don't agree about a lot of things, okay? That's okay. And most of my friends, I want them.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I have done for my entire childhood. So Mars does exactly appeal to me. I've had enough of that. I want to be in a city with people. But I think it goes back to the thing that matters to me is what I said before. People are blinded. They're pissed off about Elon for one thing or another. And it blinds them to learning. That guy is showing us. Here's how you make modern industries.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things there. One, I do know Jeff. I don't know Elon. So I know as much as you. I've seen publicly what he's done. I'm a little more, I don't know if it's just because of Blue Origin, but I'm a little more on the space for colony side of things than on the Mars thing. You only get one Mars anyway. And so it doesn't seem like that good of a destination.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There you go. So The answer to that question is the answer to every question about the future, about what's happening in the world around us. We need to solve all the things in that window. Like let's build in less than 10 years everything.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But not just that. The Apollo program was less than 10 years, the Space Shuttle program, the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, okay, ships, yeah, we could do that in 10 years. The nuclear reactor, totally we can do it in 10 years. We're going to do it by July. So all these crazy sounding things that we do, I looked at them as things that definitely will get done in 100, but we're going to try and do it in 10. And I think that I learned that from Jeff. You know, and you look at what, you know, even Amazon is doing, you know, they're taking on a whole bunch of projects that they could prove a success in less than 10 years. They're like a giant venture fund internally, basically. Silicon Valley is thousands of million dollar experiments. You know, we just try all these things that could be done in 10 years or less. And in 10 years, you could do a lot. I think people don't realize Google, Apple, Microsoft, all companies that were successful in less than 10 years.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You extend the horizon. In 100 years, anything could happen. In 100 years, the regulatory environment could change. Maris could be out of business. All the cabals could be out of business, whatever. All the things, any objection you have probably could be solved in 100 years. So then ask yourself, does it have to take 100 years? Or could we do it in 10? And if you can start to craft a vision for how to do it in 10, then you align with a lot of the machinery in the world that works. Venture funds are all 10-year funds. I can't invest in things that take 20, but I can't invest in things that take 10. So all the money is in 10-year funds. So people's careers could do, you know, they could sign up for a 10-year project, but a 20-year project might be too much. So that's the kind of thing that helps me craft a vision for what I could invest in.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it would start with one small step. Blue Origin is that one small step. Can we get it started? And it's actually a really amazing thing. And so I learned to start by thinking on longer-term horizons. And that's not super like a thousand year project to build space colonies, obviously not very relevant to me. I run a 10-year venture fund like everybody else who's an investor. What does that mean for me? gives me a way to think about new technologies. If I look at this nuclear reactor that goes in a borehole, as an example, or this cargo ship, and I say, all right, a hundred years from now, are we going to be burning nasty bunker oil to move those happy meal toys around? Or would we make these self- Know anything about tech to answer that question?”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build a future for humans off of this planet, turn Earth into like a wildlife refuge that maybe you would visit once in a lifetime, you know, because this is an awesome, amazing, and beautiful place, and we don't want to fuck it up too badly. So that sounds crazy. None of us are going to be around for that. But it might take thousands of years to craft that future for humanity. In the best case scenario, Earth just melts into the sun. And that's if nothing else wipes us out in the meantime. So we got to, if you believe in the sanctity of human life, you believe in humans or something special, and I do, then in the long run, you want to build kind of a plan B, if not planet B. So that's what Blue Origin is about. Now, that's going to take generations, maybe millennia to do, but even”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get those lessons. Yeah. So, for example, what I learned working for Jeff that really made a big difference to me personally was that if you think about Blue Origin, what is really going on there? It's not a way for Jeff to get rich. That's covered. So, why bake blue origin? Well, Blue Origin's vision”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that one, I would think it's a very important one because you sort of, like you said, sort of flippantly mentioned billionaires. And people get pissed off about these folks as soon as they're rich just because they're rich or successful. But often what I see is it's blinding them. It's blinding people to learning what is it that made those people successful? What is it that's good? What is it that's replicable? What are the lessons? And that's why I think we kind of need you to pay attention to them because for better or worse, more people will probably listen to you than these billionaires. And so you can.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A while was training with a Sherlock Holmes esque cane. I forgot what's that called, Bartitsu. It's great. I mean, I really love Neil. He's delightful. But he would spend about half his day writing in the morning and then the afternoon working on some crazy project. And I got to work on a lot of those with him.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It certainly is a Neil, delightful. We got to obviously do Blue Origin together. He helped us start the intellectual ventures lab. He and I started a sword fighting school one time.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One brand of cars can open any car from that manufacturer. I think they probably have fixed this by now, but you would have to, or at least in modern cars, I sure hope so. I'm not going to say how to do it. But yeah, that's a vulnerability that has poor foresight because in those days, this is an old attack, so I don't mind talking about too much. You don't have a system update. Those cars are not online. Now a Tesla and modern cars almost all have an internet connection and they can run system update. which is a very important way of reducing attack surface for vulnerabilities. So now that cars have system update, we could fix something like that remotely. But in those days, you couldn't. And so it was a pretty wild attack for a while.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the remote key buttons that you have for your car, they're kind of like RFIDs. They have a battery in them so they can emit a signal and the car is listening for that signal. When you build almost anything, you build it to do the thing, but you almost always build a little back door. Watch board games. Okay, so Major Malfunction Not through hacking, but by calling tech support for his because his wife was locked out in a sketchy situation, was told, oh, do this, manipulate the key. So he's able to manipulate the key to open any. He explained this to me, and I don't know if he was drunk or what, but he probably shouldn't have. And so”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only defensible hacker movie ever. I keep trying. I keep, you know, Hollywood calls me to put hackers in the movie. I keep trying My influence is completely lost. It's just fake access control override again. So”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, just a philosophy. Oh, totally good movie. It's a good movie. It's awesome. Go watch it. I mean, I don't even watch movies, but trust me, this one's good. And war games. Those are the two movies in the world to watch. Everything else you can ignore.”
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 so sure and be right all the time. And they really aren't anyway. They're spectators in the world. They're not building something anyway. So I think be open to things and be supportive. One of the best things about Silicon Valley in the 90s was the way everybody was like that. You know, you could just walk down the street, find a homeless dude, start telling him about self-sailing cargo ships or nuclear reactors, he'd be like, oh, cool, man. My college roommate is an astrophysicist and might be able to help you with that. Like everybody was in on it. And I think they get a bit of that now with AI. Like, people are supportive, but it's hard to find a critical mass of that dynamic anywhere else. So I try to be that for the deep tech folks.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, by the time we invest, I'm convinced and I understand enough that it's like, okay, it sounds crazy, but isn't, you know by now I'm in the business of things that sound like complete bullshit but aren't, right? I have to be right enough times that they're not, but I got to be open. So I think the zero effect is how I think about staying open to finding anything. So people come at me with perpetual motion devices every day now. And, you know, it would be crazy to invest in one of these perpetual motion devices. But it might be genius if you invest in all of them. So I do. Well, or at least a lot of them. So, you know, if one of them works, I'll have it. So that's kind of the game. And I think more people would get something out of that approach to life than the opposite, which is much more common, which is, you know, people are trying so hard.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. Well, here's how to do it, guys. If you lose your keys and you go looking for them, of all of the things in the entire world, you're only looking for one of them. And your odds of finding it are very low. But if you go looking for something in general and you don't set such a specific target, you're bound to find something. And so it's a way of thinking about like, oh yeah, if I'm open if I'm open to what's possible. So for example, why I say that's a philosophy that matters to me. I'm running like the most wild venture fund ever. We invest in things that sound crazy. And I have to be open. Most of them, even I don't like them at the beginning. Even I'm like, that sounds crazy, but I have to force myself to stay open, let the founders try and explain why it's not actually crazy.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The main character is the world's greatest private detective. And at one point in the film, he's articulating his philosophy of being the world's greatest private detector. He's a private detective who never leaves his home. So he stays home and he cracks every case. But he explains how he does it, which is that”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought I got this from him, but he says he got it from me. This is like a philosophy that drives me. So there was a film called The Zero Effect. It was like Ben Stiller made it 20 years ago.”
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 you get away with it too. So that's really cool. And you're doing such a good job of that because you've been able to bring in people, whereas someone else, and you can see this when you see experts interview people, it's not interesting. It doesn't go anywhere because they can't ask those dumb questions. Ask me some dumb questions. We'll prove it right now.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a hacker. So, I can ask all the dumbest questions in the world because nobody thinks I'm a little bit smart, a little bit dangerous, but if I don't actually know about shipping or rockets, I mean, I had to learn physics on the job. You know, I'm working with actual astrophysicists who know about rockets, and I understand what does delta V mean. And I'm like Googling that shit on the side. So I had to learn those things on the job. And I'm more fluent now, but I'm not formally trained in those things. But it's okay for me to ask a dumb question about rockets. And so I think that helped me a lot.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that works to my advantage is most of my colleagues and friends are legitimate scientists or engineers and they're formally trained and they know what they're doing. Those folks Get stuck with kind of some professional liability. If you're a scientist, you can't say crazy shit because that could be professionally damaging.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“M dash M dash for millennial. I like that. So I think that my suspension of disbelief, my willingness, also I think one of the other”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at this point, I'd say I'm kind of the canonical T shaped person. You know, I went real deep in computers. And so I can appreciate and communicate with people who are experts in other things because I'm kind of a generalist. So I don't write much code. I mean, I'm fucking vibe coding for fun, but like no one cares about any code I'm writing. I'm not that guy. But because my depth of knowledge is deep, I can appreciate another expert's depth of knowledge and I think that that helps me to work with folks. A lot of people get pigeonholed into just the thing. We see that with scientists or engineers a lot. They're specialized too much. And if you look at like millennials, they're kind of typically very flat. They just, you know, I could do anything, but they can't do anything well.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Central Washington, we've fired the thing up and it goes up and flies around like a UFO and then it comes and back down and does vertical landing. So we proved that it could be done and that was the day we decided to go do it with a rocket and Blue Origin got started on a track to go build a rocket. And that's when I left. You don't need me to build a rocket.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally not safe. This is before you can buy a quadcopter at Walmart. So we had to write all the code to do self-balancing and stuff on these microcontrollers and get it working and do thrust vectoring and all this. Anyway, we drugged this thing out into the desert in...”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Done all right, and now it's like putting a billion or more every year in Blue Origin. But the point is we could get further faster by standing on the shoulders of NASA and Russia than starting in a 50 billion dollar hole inventing some new propulsion scheme. So a bunch of ideas that were really cool. And this, again, started in 2001. I'm going to go to Blue Origin next week for the 25th anniversary. I get to meet some of the staff. I don't have anything to do with it anymore, but hopefully get to meet some of the folks who are taking that and running with it. We built this terrifying craft with four Rolls Royce jet engines that we retooled to operate vertically and made like a quadcopter out of them”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, totally, so can't make rockets sail, but we thought maybe you could. So what if you could just take the payload, the craft, the part you want, you know, people or the stuff or the satellites, and then beam power to it from the ground, which sounds kind of crazy, but every day gets easier and easier. Like we have the technologies that could do that now. So I think eventually we will do these things. But the problem was Jeff Bezos was the one who started Blue Origin. He's the one funding it. In those days, Jeff was worth like $7 billion. And our job was to figure out what we could do with like one.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, rockets are like 90% fuel. So, when you light up a rocket, you're just burning fuel to get out of Earth's gravity well.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jeremy introduced me, Neil. Neil said, Hey, we're building a lab to do some cool stuff. You know, come check it out. So I went down to this lab. So Neil and an astrophysicist named Keith Rosima had gotten this old envelope factory and turned it into like a machine shop. They bought a machine shop on surplus. And actually the crusty old machine has kind of came with it. So they were trying to build what was called blue operations and it was and I went down there and like, okay, we're trying to go to space. I'm like, cool, whatever. Space is good. I got nothing else going. Let's do it. And they need help with computer stuff, of course. And so I started helping on that. And we were trying to figure out alternative ways of going to space besides rockets. Eventually we hired a couple other machinists and some other super nerds and tried all these experiments. And that was the origin of Blue.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mutual friends. Okay. Jeremy Bornstein introduced us, and he was the founder of the company I'd been working for doing AI stuff that got shut down in dot-com bubble, sock puppet attack.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was working on cryptocurrency in 98 when Crypto Domicon came out. So I'm a closet and you'll see that some fan. And so I got an email from Neil and he's like, hey.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I'm from Alaska, Seattle's like the default next stop. So I knew more people in Seattle than anywhere. And so I was just hanging out in Seattle during the summer with fun employed and looking at real estate prices thinking, oh, this could be okay. And then I got an email from Neil Stevenson.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, fine. But good entrepreneurs. No tech. So let's arm those guys with some actual technology. That's what I think. But that's not your question. The point is, in 2001, everything got shut down. Silicon Valley was a wasteland. You couldn't start companies. You couldn't do hardly anything. So I ran out of excuses to pay rent and go broke in San Francisco. And so Seattle was like for the price of rent in San Francisco. I could rent like a whole neighborhood. And I was like, oh, try that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a bad attitude about this because we had real technologies, you know, and we got shut down too. I don't like what I see in Silicon Valley. It's too much crap, not enough actual technology. We overindexed on entrepreneur and we threw the inventors under the bus. It's time to course correct. You know, I want to find, I want the guy from WeWork and I want to give him a nuclear reactor. Like, let me arm you. If you are an entrepreneur that wants to build a company, great, let me arm you with IP, with an invention, with a CTO. I can hook you up. Only the good ones. So that's kind of where I think this goes.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they had this ad campaign they spent like a billion dollars on ads like Super Bowl ads with a sock puppet. And it was just the most ridiculous thing.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I was in Silicon Valley before that, and I would say the main reason I left is that Sock Puppet attack. In 2001, everything in Silicon Valley got shut down because of the dot-com bubble. And so”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just Yeah, I mean, some of these are very just circumstances that I ended up being open to when most people wouldn't. I'd say that's the biggest thing. And I think it's replicable. Other people could do that. Think about your worst case scenario. Your startup fails. You end up on your mom's couch. Regroup. Try again. For most people, you and I know. Most people in the US, most people in tech, that's what it looks like. It's not so bad. Why are you over optimizing on safety? Why are you going to work for a big tech company or Goldman Sachs or whatever? That's optimizing for safety.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is probably what you could say about me is I do have a kind of extreme risk tolerance. My whole career, I've only worked on things that I thought were cool or interesting. I'll optimize for that over everything else. I've gone broke a bunch of times because I worked on things that were like way too soon or way too cool or way too expensive. I'm not going to do that anymore. But I'm okay with that because I'm good at doing things I'm interested in. I think people are optimized for that. I don't find that I'm effective if I'm working on something that's not interesting. So I've always optimized for that. So I took on things a decade before other people would see them as rational. That's how I ended up in some of those unusual situations in my career. As far as billionaires go, I don't think I'm just a shiny object. They can hire whoever they want.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT