#827: Pablos Holman — One of The Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met

The Strange Apprenticeship of an Inventor

Pablo's Holman arrives in stories: a boy with one of the earliest Apple IIs in Alaska, a hacker who once stole credit-card numbers onstage as performance art, and a serial inventor who helped design machines for space, medicine, and public health. The narrative that ties those episodes together is a consistent curiosity about what tools will do if someone takes them apart, a devotion to reverse engineering and a stubborn insistence that invention deserves a seat at the table of influence and capital.

From Basements to Machine Shops: How a Hacker Learns to Make

Raised where winters last and neighbors are scarce, he describes learning by dismantling: not for mischief, but to understand the hidden structure of things. That impulse became a career bracketed by long, risky projects — the hacker bot that drove up to conference attendees and displayed their Wi-Fi passwords, the vertical-landing quadcopter that felt like a UFO in a desert field, the early machine-shop experiments that fed a now-global space company. The pattern is telling: a hacker’s appetite for puzzles, paired with a machine shop and a willingness to stay in the room long after most give up, accelerates invention.

The inventor’s apprenticeship

Holman argues that invention is different from craft: the first attempt at something new is usually the hardest, but subsequent iterations are craft and scale. He praises skateboarder Rodney Mullen as a model inventor—someone who imagined the impossible and spent years making it real—then watched that trick spread globally overnight. That zero-to-one work, he says, should be treated as a recognizable discipline with career paths and cultural prestige.

Deep Tech and the Fundamentals of Risk

Holman distinguishes between the market risks that dominate Silicon Valley playbooks and the technical risks that define deep-technology ventures. He looks for breakthroughs that are an order of magnitude better — ten times faster, cheaper, or more efficient — because only large multipliers can survive the long slog of engineering and regulation. His venture playbook deliberately takes early technical risk and aims industrial markets that dwarf consumer software in revenue, believing that once a hard technical hurdle is overcome, market adoption often follows.

Regulatory tracks and the energy domino

One recurring thesis is sequencing: pick the lead domino that makes other problems easier to solve. For Holman that domino is energy. Cheap, abundant power changes the arithmetic for recycling, carbon capture, large-scale manufacturing, and computing. That conviction explains why he spends time on nuclear deployments as a priority — including small, factory-produced reactors that can be buried in boreholes for passive safety — and why he believes hyperscalers will help resurrect large-scale power investments.

Shipping, Autonomy and the Physics of Scale

Another thread is an engineer’s distaste for accepted inefficiencies. Holman traces how container standards and megaships create port congestion; he proposes a contrarian fix: many smaller, autonomous sailing vessels that trade fuel for weather prediction and clever routing. It is a design trade rooted in fluid dynamics and logistics — doubling ship size does not double drag — and in geopolitics: new designs could unmoor global chokepoints if built and deployed at scale.

• Smaller, autonomous sailing vessels reduce bunker fuel dependence and port congestion.
• Weather prediction and electric backup make wind-derived propulsion operationally viable.
• Regulatory and cartel structures remain the main nontechnical barrier to adoption.

Hacking, Ethics and the Marketplace for Exploits

Holman refuses romantic simplifications: hackers are creative problem solvers who practice off-label uses of technology, but the market for zero-day exploits and military-grade vulnerabilities complicates public debate. He describes brokers who buy such vulnerabilities and sell them to governments, the valuing of zero-click exploits, and the reality that a state-level adversary can break systems no individual defense will insulate from entirely. The takeaway: basic digital hygiene helps, but high-end attack capability is a separate, asymmetric layer of risk.

How to Join the Next Wave of Builders

The argument Holman makes to engineers and entrepreneurs is both practical and moral: if you have learned to ship software, aim your curiosity and operational skills at harder, larger problems — chips, reactors, shipping, food systems and robotics. Those sectors are less-traveled and, he contends, offer more leverage for impact. He wants to be a bridge: an investor and convener for people who can engineer real-world systems and for founders who can commercialize them.

Final thought: a case for radical openness

Holman adopts what he calls a zero-effect philosophy: stay open to ideas that look implausible and cultivate a willingness to try many things, knowing most will fail. That tolerance for blunders, reframed as a disciplined portfolio of curiosity, is his answer to pessimism. It is not optimism for its own sake but a purposeful, engineered openness: the willingness to take on long horizons, accept early technical risk, and place bets on infrastructure that makes future options possible. The future, in his view, is not inevitable — it is built, one stubborn experiment at a time.

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