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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't play this game anymore, but friends do say I were to discover a way to make a zero-click exploit for iPhone. That's probably the most valuable thing in the world 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
“If you are the target of a sophisticated, mostly nation state actor, it would just be an extreme lifestyle change to insulate yourself against that. And there's a very sophisticated game of finding new exploits, selling them mostly to governments, and then they sit on them. They don't use them because every time you use a new exploit, like say I've got a way of hacking an iPhone, that is so valuable. I'm going to save it for a really, really, really good use, right? The day I use it, I risk someone figuring out that it exists. So I want it to be what's called zero day. So you don't use those lightly. So most people don't have anything to worry about because governments don't give a shit about you. And so I think you're fine. If they start to. You're going to have a problem”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's true. The problem is it is a moving target so there's this kind of war of escalation between attackers and defenders. And a lot of what people are familiar with is just kids in Romania screwing around trying to attack against every IP address of the internet and see what falls in their lap. That's kind of stealing credit cards and Bitcoin wallets and stuff. So you could kind of say it doesn't really count. I mean, it sucks, but that's all the recommendations you've heard of use a password manager and stuff will help you with that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're cracking Wi Fi at the time. One of our buddies had made a tool called Air Snort to crack Wi-Fi, and we were cracking Wi-Fi and stealing passwords for fun. But the cool thing about the hacker bot was it was just insanely media genic kind of thing where everybody thought it was cute. It's a nefarious robot stealing your passwords, but people thought it was cute. So we realized we could, in those days, we were just trying to raise the alarm about how insecure everything was. And nobody gave a shit about it. No one wanted to hear from hackers. Hackerbot kind of got on television and that kind of thing. And so we learned something from that, how to contextualize the lesson. I made a lot of friends stealing passwords too.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anywhere, anywhere. Yeah. Drive up to them and then show them their passwords on the screen. Because, you know, we had all the tools for cracking.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And eventually we figured out it should have a reason. So we're like, well, what should our robot do? Neither of us drink beer, so it didn't need to fetch beer. We're like, well, we could make it do some hacking since that's what we're normally doing. So it became the hacker bot. And everything that a robot can do, a nerd with a Linux t-shirt and a laptop can do. So we made the robot so it would drive around and it would find people who kind of like triangulate Wi-Fi users.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a great friend. So, Eric starts trying to get PWM controllers and all the stuff to build a robot. I bought the wheels. I'm good at buying wheels. We started building this thing kind of assembling it as it goes.”
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 was like a long time ago. So, Eric Johansen is kind of my co conspirator on a lot of hacking stuff. He and I were hanging out. We went to one of those first robotics competitions, which are huge now. It's teenagers making robots that they turned into like a spectator sport. And we realized like, oh, these kids are making robots. If they can do it, we should be able to do it because we're super geniuses with a machine shop. I had the Blue Origin machine shop. So I figured we could build a robot. So we started, you know, like Eric is amazing. You know, you come up with an idea, he'll smoke cigarettes and stay up all night and get it done while I go to sleep. And so Eric goes a friend to have.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, he's literally the only one. But how many music artists could you name? Or painters, or actors. And it's just the contrast is extreme. It's our most important creative class, inventor, and they don't count. And I think we've got to fix that.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he invented what was possible. And so I think that is so important. So it's kind of analogous to my Apple 2 and Alaska thing. But what's so cool about it is that once Rodney does a new trick, puts it on YouTube. Two weeks later, kids in Kazakhstan are doing it better than him. And so it's a very important contrast, I think, to show people the difference between what an inventor does the first time, the zero to one, that first time is incredibly hard. It takes lifetimes. It takes careers. It takes everything you've got to do something the first time that humans have never seen before. Every time after that, the second time to the nth time, that's craft. That is not invention. That's not art. That's craft. You know, you need a skill to do it, right? You need to be able to skate to invent. But I want people to understand how important inventors are. And we throw them under the...”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He grew up in rural Florida. So we have this kind of odd parallel childhood. I mean, Rodney is way more important than me, but Rodney's childhood was in rural Florida. No neighbors like a farm. And he had a little patch of cement in the driveway. His entire skateboarding life started there. No one around him could skateboard. He didn't have any influences. He just had his brain and the skateboard.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mind that's never been done before may be impossible. He can spend months every night trying to make it happen on a skateboard and then finally get it.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man. So Rodney Mullen, I don't have to describe for anyone who ever touched a skateboard because Rodney is the godfather of street skating. He's the guy who invented every single thing you've ever seen a kid do on a skateboard, including like, he's the first one to like Ollie a skateboard, which is the fundamental basis of all street skating. I'm a shitty skateboarder, but Rodney is one of my favorite people on earth. He's such a delightful human. And we spend all night hanging out together talking about everything but skateboarding. I've used him as an example of an inventor, again, because I'm trying to show people that an inventor is a valuable and important thing. Hackers are one source of inventor, but skateboarder is inventor. There's a difference between Rodney and every other skateboarder. And that difference is that Rodney will imagine something in his mind.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are doing can be taken places that are not computers. And you did that with. The things in your books, you know, that's what the tango thing is, and the wrestling thing is, and all those examples, you know, swimming and all the things that you showed in your books. That's the exact same thing hackers are doing, and you're showing them that it can go somewhere else. And that means a lot to me because I'm trying to get hackers to see that they could go somewhere else besides computers.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could say maybe what magicians are inventing is useless, and you could argue that a lot of what hackers are inventing is useless. It's like, why are you spending all of your time trying to figure out how to fuck with Google Maps? They're just going to fix that bug and then it'll be useless. But to Sammy, it's no problem at all. Like that is what he wants to do with his time. And so I think a big part of it too is this, you could say as a class, maybe hackers have ADHD, but they can focus on what they're interested in. And when they get interested in a puzzle, they'll just go deep. And so you have to do that as well to get somewhere that no one's gotten before. This is actually my reason I think I'm here, because I want you to know that you are the hacker. You're like a very important hacker. And you don't think of yourself that way. But the reason is you are the one who showed people that what hackers”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, off label. And so they're creative in a sense. They are the people who figure out what is possible. You can't invent a new technology by reading the directions. That's just never happened. Ever. So a hacker, you know, I'm interested in their minds as inventors. I'm interested in their minds as creative people who are going to figure out how to elevate what humans can do. And so a good hacker is somebody who is willing to do that. I learned a little bit about hackers because I was, like you sort of described, I was doing this bizarre kind of hacker magic show stealing people's passwords, but some magicians, actual magicians showed up in my audience one time and they explained to me like, hey, you kind of suck as a magician. And I'm like, oh yeah, you could probably tell me what I should do. And what I realized is magicians getting to know them are like these people who will spend an obscene amount of time more than anyone can imagine focused on the most”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the hackers have one way or another ended up being the people who start from that position I described. They're the ones who don't take the conventional wisdom of what something is for.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, Google Maps is one of my favorite things he did early on. Sammy was finally allowed to use computers again. And he figured, you know, Google colors the roads based on for traffic. Sure. Based on where everybody's phone is just reporting to Google when you're stuck in traffic. And so Sammy figured out he could just lie to Google. He just sent a bunch of fake data to Google. And he figured out how to structure it so that he could make all the roads he's about to drive on just clear out. Because they look like they all look like traffic jams. And so Sammy could manipulate the traffic. I mean, Google's since fixed this, but I often like to show off Sammy on stage. And so I've shown his exploits a bunch of times, and that's one 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, so the way I described that before in the book is just a simple way of thinking about the mindset of a hacker. Most people, if you get a new gadget like your phone and give it to your mom, she'll ask you, what does this do? That's a totally normal question. iPhone, mom says on the box. If you give a new gadget to a hacker, then the question is, what can I make this do? And they're starting from a completely different position. They're going to take out the screws, break it into a lot of pieces. You've met Sammy. He's the poster child for this, you know. He's violating the warranty before he got the shrink wrap off.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It made an impression just not the one that maybe I was going for. So I'm still doing that. These technologies are important.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was super slow, but I was lit up, and so I tried to convince everyone around me that this computer was going to be amazing someday. And no one believed me. They'd never seen a computer, but they were sure they weren't cool. And so I was like inviting girls over to my basement to show them my computer.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my dad had put some of the first mainframes in the oil industry in the early 70s, let's say. So he kind of wasn't really a computer guy, but he had a notion that these things might be interesting. And when Apple needed customers at the beginning of Apple, they went to the oil industry because that was the big rich industry at the time. My dad said, sure, we'll take one. So I got one of the first Apple II I'm like, you know, nine, ten, eleven years old at Apple II. I had a skateboard. People were sure that neither of them was a good waste of time, but it was a fair fight. It was just too early. And I was lit up about this thing. Apple II isn't very powerful. And in those days, computers weren't useful. It didn't have hardly any memory.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't get that most people get. And so a hacker is somebody who I think is attracted to puzzles. They are attracted to computer security because it's a bottomless pit of puzzles. And I am trying at this point hack everything but computers and I'm trying to rescue hackers out of the computer security department and get them into helping go attack bigger problems.”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm a hacker because my early life was all around reverse engineering a computer. And that was sort of out of necessity because I grew up in Alaska and there was nobody around who'd ever seen a computer. But I got one when I was like nine years old, one of the first couple thousand Apple II's ever made. So I had a computer in the cold, in the dark, in the basement in Alaska, and nobody to show me anything about how it worked. So I had to learn by reverse engineering what we would call reverse engineering. You kind of break things and see what they do and then try to learn from that. And so I learned the hard way. And then for the first, I don't know, a couple decades of my career was all about trying to do new things with computers and advanced computers. And I didn't have any formal training. I didn't go to college. Software development was invented long after I got started. So there's a lot of”
2025-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT