60: The Futurist with Pablos Holman

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: Pablos Hallman is a hacker inventor in entrepreneur who leverages superpowers. We get from technology to reimagine everything humans do. He helps start blue origin for Jeff Bezos, as well as intellectual ventures lab for Nathan Merold. Currently Pablos is a venture capitalist at deep future backing mad scientists, rogue inventors, crazy hackers, and Maverick entrepreneurs who are implementing science fiction, solving big problems, and helping our species become better anstestors.

Chris: Pablos, thanks for stopping by BarCode man.

Pablos: Yeah, Awesome!

Chris: so Pablo so many angles that I want to attack this conversation from before my listeners, I think it’s important to first help them understand who you are personally and, and where your story begins. Right? So let’s start at the core.

Chris: you grew up in Alaska.

Pablos: Yeah. I grew up in Alaska.

Chris: got into computers at a young age.

Pablos: Yeah. I got my first apple two when I was about nine. So it was one of the first, one of the first apple twos. Like I probably one of the first couple thousand apple twos ever made. Wow.

Chris: Yeah. Wow. I can’t say, I know too many people that had an apple two

Pablos: Oh, I know a lot. But yeah, in those days, so that was kind of like the first home computer, the first computer that you could have at home. And so, I, I, I kind of, like most of your listeners probably all grew up with computers, but I’m like the first one to grow up with a computer, I guess.

Chris: Yeah. So what were you into with the apple two? Were you were you programming at that time or were you more into gaming?

Pablos: So apple two. So those days, like nobody had seen a computer at all. Right. And, and so it was. I had seen a computer because my dad had, had put some of the first computers in the, in the oil industry.

Pablos: And at the time that was, the biggest industry in the world and the wealthiest. And so, so that was the, they, they bought computers early, but they had these, mainframes and like crazy, huge machines and he just thought it was cool. So, so he got computers set up in was at Arco at the time.

Pablos: And so I kind of got to go to his office and just see this stuff. And I don’t think he really understood him and I didn’t really understand him, but it was, it was exciting. And so when the apple two came out, apple was looking for customers and the oil industries just bought everything.

Pablos: You go at those in those days. And so kinda like the tech industry now. And so he decided to get me a computer or just get one for the house. I, I don’t know. He just thought it was cool. And, and so we got that thing and I immediately just. dove in, I spent my entire childhood on that thing and, and it was such a weird time because, there was cer first, there was like, nobody who knew more about it than me, even though I was like nine or 10 years old.

Pablos: And then it was, there was no internet. So like just getting software was, it was like, it was, it was an adventure because you had to like to find out who else had a computer and then like go over to their place and get, and like swap F floppy. Right. Which is not a euphemism like we had. I remember like I’m like a kid and my parents would like to drop me off at some shady trailer park across town to hang out with some ski old dude and, and, and like copy his, his floppy discs undermine.

Pablos: I couldn’t even. Like discs were everybody, like, these are like five and a quarter inch floppy discs. And they’re like, I remember at first, they were like five bucks each or something, you know? So I didn’t have a lot of ’em you couldn’t, you couldn’t afford to just like waste floppy discs on stuff.

Pablos: And that disc had to hold the entire OS and the app and all your data. So it was just, everything was so limited. But anyway, yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty rough, slow going in those days. There was no, there were some games, but that, games were exciting, but they were, you had to like to go trade your games for somebody else’s games.

Pablos: And you had to like it was just hard to get stuff. And it’s Alaska, like if you tried to order something in the mail, you had to literally like mail a check to some other state. And wait, like six weeks for someone to mail you a floppy disc back in the mail. so it was, it was just dark ages, but anyway, that was that’s.

Pablos: That’s why I learned so much, I think is I, I had a lot of a lot of time to crash my apple two and reboot it. Yeah.

Chris: By the time you get the game, the apple three’s out already.

Pablos: apple three was a dud. Apple three was totally useless. Nobody wanted that thing. Yeah, it was, it was like a bizarre, it was like Apple’s attempt to like to make an apple two compelling to business and it just completely didn’t work.

Chris: I didn’t get my first apple to about a year ago. Okay. All right. Cool. I’ve been windows all this time. Okay. Okay. Sure. My first computer was a, a Tandy 5,000. Oh, okay. All right. That’s so that, that was back. Yeah, that was back in the day. But no apple, man. I don’t think we could afford it.

Pablos: Well, it was I don’t know.

Pablos: It’s hard to afford anything.

Chris: yeah. So cool, man. So when, so you got that, you, you were already interested in it. When did you realize that technology was the career path that you wanted to go down? What can you remember? What hooked you or what made you gravitate specifically to technology?

Pablos: I, I don’t think there was like ever any chance of doing anything else. Like I was, I was hooked on this apple two. I thought it was amazing. I tried to convince everyone else of that from childhood and, and. people had never seen a computer, but they were pretty sure it wasn’t cool. And I was really trying to, to convince people that, no, this is, this is gonna be powerful and useful.

Pablos: And someday it’ll, have enough memory to actually do something. And no one believed me. I remember like everybody would come over. It was in a small town in Alaska, so people would hear that I had a computer and they would like to come over to like, see the computer. It’d be like, if you had a, a giraffe living in your backyard, like people would come by to see the giraffe, it was kind of like that.

Pablos: Yeah. And so, people would come over and I’d take ’em down to the basement and show ’em the computer and I’d try to show ’em what it could do. And just completely, just to say they saw, they had no conception of what I was talking about. But it, I think that had me. It may be motivated to try and figure out how to convey to people, why it was important and why it could be helpful to them.

Pablos: And I was really motivated to do that. And that kind of set me on a different course than a lot of other people who got into computers early, because, by the time I got outta high school or something computers had somewhat legitimized themselves in business and I could I wanted to go use them.

Pablos: I wanted to put computers to use, to do things for people. And so I could get hired by anybody to go put computers in a BI in a company. And that was exciting to me and where, whereas going and learning about, I don’t know, like computer science I’m not even sure that was a term yet, you know the science of computation, like how chips work and electrical engineering, that’s kind of what universities were doing at the time.

Pablos: Yeah. And. Some of that. I already knew all the, like the software side of things I already knew. I understood at a very low level, like what all the ones and zeros were doing, but I, I didn’t necessarily know all the, like the electronics aspect of things was still kind of mysterious to me, but, but it didn’t that wasn’t the important part.

Pablos: Important part to me was like, take a computer or stick it in front of somebody and, and show them how it could make their life better. That was very exciting to me. And, and so building applications and, and that kind of stuff for users and even just showing ’em how to use a computer, that was all exciting to me for a long time.

Pablos: And so I did, I guess from the, the point is I felt like I had this superpower from an early age of like I could make, I could make things better than anyone imagined and using a computer. And so I kind of got hooked on computers first as a technology. And then over time, Computers became, so they were so generally useful that you could use them to advance other technologies.

Pablos: Right. And so I ended up getting drawn into a lot of other things that it weren’t wasn’t about advancing computers as much as using computers to advance other things. And, and what I got interested in was advancing technologies. so by like maybe by the late nineties or something, I wasn’t trying to just use computers.

Pablos: In other businesses I was trying to use computers to advance other technologies and then, and then it kind of extended from there. And so now I’m just more fixated on, on advancing technologies all across the board. Even though computers is kind of where I started.

Chris: Yeah. So I think over time, Evolved into what you would call the, the cipher punk era, right?

Chris: Yeah. And that was more around in the early to mid-nineties,

Pablos: I’d say mid to late nineties for me. There was certainly some, some of the origin story of cipher punks goes back further than that, but I ended up in the bay area in the nineties working on I was, I had a company that was, we were trying to do cryptocurrency in the nineties.

Pablos: And wow. And, and that, and so we had a, the kind of bay area, cipher punks, there were working on these technologies, trying to use crypto systems, cryptographic protocols to, to change the way we do things online. And my part of it was more about currency and transaction processing, but there were a lot of other things cipher, punks were focused on at the same time.

Chris: And cipher punk started in the bay area. Right. Is that how you got involved with

Pablos: it? I think it. I would say it started on a, on Usenet okay. That might be, or that, that, so it was a

Chris: form essentially, right. Or a

Pablos: yeah, cyberpunks goes, goes way back. I mean, I think depending on what you count maybe the late eighties, even, so there there’s a few guys who are sort of the originators of the, of the cypher punks and the, that were kind of philosophically the basis for it.

Pablos: So that’s like Eric Hughes and Tim may in particular. And, but they really kind of got the, the whole thing started as a, as a community of people who are, looking out into the future of the internet, seeing that, as the internet grows, a lot of the usual societal problems would kick in and have an effect on the network.

Pablos: And in, in particular people would try to control the. not or people or organizations or governments or whatever seems accurate to me. Yeah. And in the view of, of this particular group of fringe wackos on the internet, they, they saw the history of people and governments as being fairly poorly behaved when they get, when they get control.

Pablos: And so, so the, so the cipher punks really, I’d say the fundamental insight there was that we could use the cryptographic toolkit to create protocols that would ensure that the internet stayed free and that these protocols could use cryptography to level the playing field. we could use cryptography to create, you know internet protocols that didn’t allow anyone to get.

Pablos: Control of the network, no one could control what we do. We can’t control what you do. And we see that as being kind of a, a modern human, right. And so you obviously there’s that that’s a bit radical. Even now, a lot of people are looking to governments to exert more control over the internet and things like that.

Pablos: And so, cipher punks was never a very mainstream thing. And, and, and I think, it’s important to understand, like there’s no, there’s no application process or membership card. Like anybody can just join that email list or those days anybody could join and, and dive in. So, if you think discourse on Twitter is actively hostile, well, go read the cipher punks archives because, do they exist?

Pablos: Oh, the archives are there and this is very important. I mean, it’s all public, the whole list was public and, and it was unique because it also allowed for anonymous posters, right. Because anonymity was considered one of the fundamental things you needed to be free online. And so the Cy punks list allowed anyone to post there’s a lot of spam and shit to filter through, but it made for very rigorous intellectual discourse.

Pablos: Yeah. Right. Because it, because anyone could say anything freely and the only things that were respected were the things that were technically accurate. And so, and you had a lot of very extreme politics in the thinking behind these things, right. By extreme, I mean, extreme dedication to freedom and, and lots of different interpretations about what that means and, and how far it should be taken and all that.

Pablos: But I think, you know I haven’t tried to go back and read the C for punks archives, cuz I, I lived through that. But as a historical record, I think they’re very important because there’s very little going on today in, in the, even in the extensive crypto and defi and web three and all that stuff that wasn’t massaged by the cipher punks.

Pablos: And so we had anticipated the need for this stuff. I think what’s exciting now is to kind of see that things have played out the way we’d hoped technically better than we could have hoped technically. The, the crypto toolkit is pretty highly developed now thanks to the hype cycle of cryptocurrency.

Pablos: We’ve attracted a whole generation of coders to that. in those days there were, I don’t know, maybe a hundred people on earth. I think could code and also understand cryptography in a meaningful way. It was a very small community and, and 99 of them were C punks. So yeah, that’s how I think about it.

Chris: Yeah. I’d love to go back and look at those archives and correlate. Yeah. What was stated then to modern day technology. So I’m sure like,

Pablos: oh yeah. It would be a fascinating, somebody needs to write a book to doing that. I mean, it’s, you wanna read Eric Hughes and Tim, may you wanna read Bob Hega, there’s, there’s great posts in there by, by a whole bunch of different folks who are thinking about this stuff and trying to figure out how do we, how do we, and then also a bunch of really technical posts about, advancements in cryptography and what they could enable because each little, each little advancement gave us.

Pablos: A bit more optimism about being able to construct these protocols.

Chris: Yeah. And you’re talking about, I mean the deep web cryptocurrency yeah. And just seeing how that evolved and, and who knows there may be something in there that stretches beyond where we are now.

Pablos: Yeah. Well, that’s what I think people don’t, I mean, cypherpunks may sound like a super niche thing, but we had a big effect overall.

Pablos: I mean, the, the, then the nineties, we, the first thing we had to do is get cryptography decriminalized right. Because at the time cryptography encryption was classified as a munition by the us government, having using a, using a cryptographic algorithm had the same export controls as a nuclear missile.

Pablos: Like you couldn’t legally export software that used strong cryptography around the world. So we had, so that we had to fight Congress on at the time the Congress had this stupid idea called the clipper chip, which was gonna be this chip that gave them a back door into all cryptography. That was idiotic.

Pablos: And we had to fight Congress and we won and not just C punks, but eff and other, other groups online really fought Congress and managed to win that over. That was important early win for what we were advocating. And then, what people don’t realize is CPRS have. at the time, our first, I, I think the kind of the first successful project we built was what were called the anonymous emailers.

Pablos: And these were, this was a cryptographic protocol that allowed people to send email anonymously. And when was

Chris: this, like, what timeframe were we looking at? This

Pablos: was live in the nineties. Okay. We had the first, yeah. So the first ones the first ones were running in the, in the mid-nineties, late nineties.

Pablos: There were, successive generations of those protocols. So

Chris: nothing existed like that at, at that

Pablos: time, at the time all email was unencrypted and wide open right, right. Very easy to spoof and, but also Not, I mean, not anonymous in the sense that like, if you wanted to figure out where an email came from, you could read the headers and go back and figure out exactly what server came from.

Pablos: So and I remember like in the early, or yeah, probably around 96 or seven, I remember like 96, I think I was, I used to an anonymous mailer to email the police and report a crime. And it was some cuz I, I had pieced together, someone I knew was stealing computers. Interesting. And I was able to figure out that that was happening, but I didn’t want the, someone I knew to figure out that I was the guy who turned him.

Pablos: Because it was uncool, not just, I mean, I didn’t know these people that well, but so I used anonymous red mailer to email the police about that, but it’s just a simple example. That’s the kind of thing that those things made possible. Right. And, but they also got used for sending death threats to people and stuff like that, which was uncool.

Pablos: So, occasionally cipher, punks were running mailers would, would get a knock on the door from the FBI or the secret service. And we’d have to explain how the whole thing worked . But yeah, anyway, the point is so, so retailers were the, one of the early things that C for punks developed. We also had other projects with varying degrees of success.

Pablos: One of them was a, an extension for AOL instant messenger called off the record, which was a way of adding encryption to instant messenger so that no one could prove. who sent the message, right. Which is important because, and, and it was encrypted both ways because you know what a lot of people don’t realize about things like public key cryptography, which is, what’s in, in S MI and SSL and all that stuff is you’re cryptographically, signing every single thing that you do.

Pablos: right. Right. And so there’s, there’s a there’s kind of a paper trail there that’s cryptographically enforced, and that’s not what you always want for every situation. So anyway, so cypher punks went on to build the mailers. Some of ’em started the tour project in another context, but same community of people made that possible tour as the onion router.

Pablos: So that’s what makes the tour browser possible. So you can browse the internet. And honestly, which is, we think is a very important thing. But if you flip tour on its head, you get the dark web. and you can, that means you could, you could also run a service, a website or, or whatever, online anonymously, and that’s obviously controversial, but that’s a big win for cipher punks.

Pablos: And then BitTorrent was a big win, also made by cipher punks. And that, that was a, a very sorry, the first really big success, which is a protocol that allows people to share huge amounts of data online for free. Again and again, this goes back to asymmetry, at the, we’re getting to a point where the only people who could afford to host large amounts of data online were Amazon and apple and Google and Microsoft, people who could have giant servers and pay for the bandwidth and, and so bid to and solved that and democratized the ability to.

Pablos: Share data online, but it got used for powering movies, a lot and stuff. So people have it got controversial and entire industries hated it, but the instructive thing about it was no one could kill it. It’s

Chris: over its game over at that

Pablos: point it’s game over because industries hate BitTorrent.

Pablos: Couldn’t kill it over the course of, we’re at 15 years or more now. So that’s what, that’s the, the thing, one of the really key things to understand about the difference between centralized services and in that case, you’d use Napster as the counterpoint centralized service fell to a, an attack, a legal attack in the case of Napster decentralized protocol, a Victor.

Pablos: Couldn’t be killed because there’s no head to chop off and it still runs, I don’t know how, 25% of the traffic on the internet or something is bit torrent. It’s crazy. Geez. So I, I, I, that’s not a real number. It’s some, it was pretty high. The last I checked, I still, I don’t know what it’s inside now, but the point is cryptographic protocols are, are powerful, important.

Pablos: And so then, where this is going obviously is Bitcoin and Bitcoin was the first time, we managed to succeed at making a cryptocurrency, which again, we’d been trying for 15 or 20 years at that point. By 2008, we’d been trying to make cryptocurrencies, but they all had problems and one of single biggest problems was nobody’d figured out how to create a cryptocurrency with a decentralized mint.

Pablos: Okay. And the decentralized mint is the most important thing because that’s what makes it. Impossible for a, anybody to cheat, right? So in every currency, in human history, before Bitcoin, there was somebody controlling the mint and that’s somebody without fail, ended up cheating right. And every currency in human history, somebody’s controlling them in and they find some excuse to issue more currency to them and their frat buddies.

Pablos: Yeah. And, and devalue it for everyone else. So, there, there are lots of important things that are possible in cryptocurrencies and lots of different attributes. And you could design one to support, whatever you cared about. But one of the fundamental things that had to be solved was how do you create the currency in a way that doesn’t allow anybody to cheat by fucking, with the value of the currency by issuing more so Bitcoin solved that.

Pablos: But the Bitcoin was probably like. I don’t know, maybe the hundredth cryptocurrency I had tested in my life. Oh, wow. Okay. I beta tested Bitcoin in like 2007 or eight. And at that point, I didn’t know it was gonna turn out to be what it did. We just thought, eh, we’re trying another stupid cryptocurrency protocol, so somewhere on floppy discs, , I’m a billionaire

Chris: so somewhere along the line, I mean cryptocurrency existed, but then yeah.

Chris: Was it silk road that really took it mainstream?

Pablos: I don’t know. I mean, I think I, I don’t even know. I mean, like I said, I think by, by 2008 I was done with it. okay. And so, yeah,

Chris: cuz that was, that didn’t happen till what, five years later.

Pablos: Yeah. I think for a lot of people, Bitcoin didn’t really.

Pablos: Register until maybe 2012 or 13 or something. by then I wasn’t really paying attention. I, I like to work on things five or 10 years before the hype cycle, but once it’s going mainstream, it doesn’t really need my help anymore. And so I think that silk road probably got Bitcoin, some press.

Pablos: But I think what I think the real lesson is that the, the advancement that Bitcoin brought of being able to create a, a decentralized min to create a deflationary currency for the first time ever, it became, it became kind of inevitable. Right. I think in some sense, Bitcoin is inevitable at that once that once that breakthrough.

Pablos: Had been made. I mean, it could be ignored. It could have taken a lot of fits and starts and maybe you could characterize the first five years or so that way, but humanity is not going back. You like you don’t when, like, when you, when humans invent a new technology and prove that it works, we adopt it eventually in time.

Pablos: So it is not like, I used the example before, like if you, it’s not like humans probably invented the wheel and then decided not to use it that, maybe for a generation or two, it was, it was controversial. And some humans thought that the, the, the wheely people were assholes and should all be, lynched or whatever that that’s probably, the normal adoption cycle

Pablos: So we killed all the people using wheels, but eventually realized, oh, you know what, it’s wheel thing actually. Pretty awesome. And so now we do wheels and, and that’s, that’s really how I think. The adoption cycle for a lot of technologies is, at first, it’s controversial and everyone’s got all these imaginary failure modes that they get terrified of and they wanna regulate it into oblivion.

Pablos: And you can see sometimes we’re successful at that for a generation or two, a good example of that in our lifetime is, is nuclear reactors have been regulated out of, out of being developed in, in the us, but there’s no question we should actually be building them. And I think that a lot of technologies are like that.

Pablos: So Bitcoin, or the decentralized mint aspect of Bitcoin in particular right now, it’s for, or at least for a while, it was like really controversial. And now it’s like controversial, but unkillable and people think that, well maybe governments are gonna try to regulate Bitcoin.

Pablos: And in the short run they can, they can try a bunch of poorly behaved bullshit, but the truth is. If you look on longer time horizons, and a century from now Bitcoin will regulate governments.

Chris: Bitcoin will regulate governments, not the other way around

Pablos: that’s right. The consensus mechanism that makes the decentralized mint possible is fundamentally democratic.

Pablos: It’s fundamentally empowering. It is a better way of doing fair decision making. The blockchain gives you transparency. It gives you audit ability. It gives you a much better way of governing a process. Then the other bullshit humans have been doing before Bitcoin. Right. And you, and so what’s exciting now that a lot of people probably aren’t paying attention to is how people are building on that.

Pablos: So, Bitcoin is by design, very limited in what it can do, but when you look at how people have advanced on that, with Ethereum and these other things. And now, when you look at how things are extending with defied smart contracts, using the blockchain to create these governance mechanisms where you could have very complex interactions and you can define, who’s allowed to do what when, and who’s allowed to change what under what circumstances and that, and that’s very important.

Pablos: It’s just like contract law, that’s why we call them smart contracts. It’s like contract law. You can define the contract to allow for interactions that are relevant. So even the things that people, bitch and moan about with, with cryptocurrency cuz cryptocurrency could be used by, terrorists or pedophiles or whatever.

Pablos: Right. So you could, you could define a cryptocurrency that, that embodies your values. Like, okay, you want to be able to unroll transactions. when they’re used to fund terrorist groups, but you don’t wanna unroll them when, they don’t need to be de anonymized or exposed or rolled back when there’s no problem or when, people are using it for legitimate things, you could define all that in a smart contract and that’s, and this toolkit gives you the ability to do that.

Pablos: The old fashioned way of doing it was kind of this giant Morra of, of humans some more well behaved than others, sort of enforcing and auditing and adjudicating every possible failure mode. So I’m very excited about the future of humans. Being able to create protocols that that are used more and more for the things that that society needs to do and get it out of the hands of, of these.

Pablos: Complicated and legal structures and things with screw incentives. So

Chris: I agree. I’m, I’m looking forward to that as well. You always see the, the spikes with, with cryptocurrency and, and, and Bitcoin. Yeah. Particularly when do you see that leveling out?

Pablos: It is leveling out over time. Right. And, and that’s the way to think about it is that, if the volatility of cryptocurrency bugs, you, well, everything else is more volatile than Bitcoin now.

Pablos: And Bitcoin, will become less volatile over time. And, that could take, I mean, it could happen faster or slower. In some sense, we’re already at a point with Bitcoin where it’s, it could, it can only be so volatile within a window. Yeah. And, and you start to see it more. Yeah, Bitcoin’s last drop was only 50% or whatever in the last couple months.

Pablos: Yeah. That’s not so bad. 50% drop . That’s not nearly as bad as it used to be when it was 50000%. So , we’re trending towards stable.

Chris: yeah, it is crazy. And I’m, I, I have like a Bitcoin ATM down the street for me.

Pablos: Oh yeah. Those are probably scams. I would stay away from that

Chris: oh, I have, I have, yeah. So I wanna stay in this lane of development and invention, but I wanna switch over real quick to 3d printing.

Chris: Oh yeah. Cause as you can see, I’m an avid 3d printer enthusiast as well. Cool. And you worked as an advisor to MakerBot which is a 3d printer manufacturer. Tell me about that. How you got involved with that? Well, I,

Pablos: I was friends with Bre Petis from years before MakerBot existed and he. So Bree used to be I was living in Seattle at the time.

Pablos: Bree was a when I met him, he was a middle school art teacher and Bree was really excited about like helping kids and people in general, just learn how to do stuff, how to build stuff, how to make stuff in a very DIY fashion. And so he started this it’s like even before YouTube, I think he, he started this video blog and nobody had done that before.

Pablos: It was like one of the only ones on the internet. I think it was called; I make things. And the video blog was Bree doing like DIY projects in his apartment. I think he like turned a VCR into a cat feeder or something and, things like that. And my buddy, Eric Johansen, and I, we had this lab called the hacker bot lab.

Pablos: In Seattle, which was just kind of what, what you would now call a hacker space. At the time this is like the early two thousands or something. And so we had built this robot called the hacker bot and then and then we invited other nerds to come and, build cool shit. a lot of the nerds, we know there’s software nerds.

Pablos: They had never built anything that moved before. And so we had this shop just full of tools and things. And so nerds would come by and do weird projects and on nights and weekends, and anyway, Bree used to come by and, and film some of those projects for his blog. And he ended up making his first robots with us.

Pablos: And so anyway, we became friends with Bree back in those days, and then he eventually moved to, he got famous from the blog and moved to New York and started a hackerspace there called NYC resistor. And then, nerds started hanging out there doing weird projects and. One of the projects they did was a weekend project to build a 3d printer.

Pablos: And they built the first maker bot at NYC resistor. None of them had ever seen an actual 3d printer before. So I had a lab in Seattle, the intellectual ventures lab where I was working and I invited Brie to come, come hang out there. And he, and he could see our 3d printers cause we had commercial ones.

Chris: And what did the commercial ones look like at that time? Weren’t they just massive in size. Yeah, they

Pablos: were big. They worked very much like a maker bot. They were, a hundred thousand or $2,000, like industrial tools for prototyping and, compared to a MakerBot or anything you’ve used, they were heavily over engineered.

Pablos: the, the, the print head was like the size of your head. Yeah. And it, had a lot of thermal control for the entire bay had, had a lot of precision machine. Custom parts to build these things. they were expensive to build and maintain and operate. The filament was all precision filament that came in a sealed cartridge with a, R F I D in it.

Pablos: So you couldn’t use ship filament in your machine? It was, it was a lot of very tightly controlled stuff and it was just early days for 3d printing and it was low volume, high value kind of stuff. And so it was expensive, no one could probably afford to do it except labs like ours. So it was pretty rare.

Pablos: So anyway, Bree ended up and, and his partners at the time ended up starting a company to make. Maker bots as kits. So they basically made a, they produced a kit out of like plywood and screws that you could buy and, and you could order the kit from them. And they had like 700 screws. So to assemble a maker bot took you like a month worth of nights and weekends of putting all these screws in to make it work.

Pablos: Yep. And they made a few versions of the kit and then they started a, a little assembly line to, to build the kits themselves. And so you could buy an assembled maker bot, that’s kind of how it started. And so I, yeah, I became an advisor for them early on. Mostly just to Bree, helping him think through stuff around the business.

Pablos: I don’t know how instrumental I really was. He was highly motivated. Bree was really good at getting people excited about 3d printing and, they tried to do it as kind of a, a very community oriented DIY homemaker. Kind of thing. Very consumer friendly. Yeah. A lot of open source. Well, I don’t know if it was consumer friendly at first, so much as like nerd friendly.

Pablos: Right. Okay. It, it, at first it was really for people who wanted to build a 3d printer. And what Bree tried to do is turn it into a company and a product for people who wanted to build things with a 3d printer. And so there was kind, that was a very difficult early transition of getting it to the point where it could be a consumer product now.

Pablos: And so with maker with replicator two, I think that was kind of the first one that was like, buy the thing you could, in a couple hours you could sort of set it up and figure out how to use it and start making stuff. And, and you didn’t have to fi with it constantly. And these days, the finning is still part of 3d printing, but it’s a lot more, there’s a lot more support and, and a lot of the problems are solved.

Pablos: So I think it’s come a long way. Yeah. The motivation for me and what I was so excited about is, I mean, I’m a real junkie for tools. Like I love tools. I love understanding them. I love knowing how things are made so that I can be inventing on the borders of what what’s possible. And if you know what the tools can do, then you can imagine what they can build.

Pablos: And so, and what I love the most are programmable tools. So a lot of the tools that we’ve had historically are very special purpose. They’re specialized. They can do one thing in manufacturing, a lot of the tools, if you want to make a happy meal toy, well, you have to make a mold and then stick it in an injection molding machine and then inject plastic in there to make those things.

Pablos: And that tool can only make one thing that one happy meal toy. And so it’s not special per it’s a, it’s not programmable, it’s not adaptable. And a cool thing about a 3d printer or a laser cutter or a water jet. These are tools that are programmable. They don’t care if they ever make the same thing twice.

Pablos: So they’re so useful for prototyping. That’s what I loved about bringing 3d printing to, to the consumer space. And that’s what MakerBot did. And I’m very proud of Bree and the team there for pioneering bringing that tool. my daughter grew up in a school with MakerBots to her and to you, like, that’s a normal way of making something.

Pablos: If you wanna make something you think about drawing it in sketch up or some CAD program and printing it, that’s just normal. Which for me growing up, I mean, I didn’t have that. I was, I spent most of my early life trying to get access to tools. , you

Chris: know, you’re writing G code from scratch,

Pablos: right? Yeah. Right.

Pablos: Exactly. And, and so I had to learn the hard way and, and, and so anyway, I think it’s. I think it’s an exciting thing that 3d printing kind of broke through and it became kind of a mainstream thing. And MakerBot had a lot to do with that. The company ended up selling to another 3d printing company. And so I don’t know how, how it’s going now, but you are probably you’re using something that’s not a maker bot, right?

Pablos: No. So

Chris: I currently have a FL sun QQS pro. Okay. I need to upgrade soon. I haven’t printed anything recently, but this is probably my third or fourth printer. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, I’ve, I’ve, MOED STLs. They have thing averse out there. Now that many people download models from, and, and you can prototype on your own, I’ve printed, the barcode logo on, on bottle openers and things like that.

Chris: But I think that prototyping, yeah. it, it, it puts. Capability in the hands of yeah. Of anyone without that overhead

Pablos: cost. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s super exciting. Even if you don’t have a 3d printer, you got a buddy who has one. And so, yeah, there’s just so much you can do. That’s really, it’s really cool.

Pablos: It’s come out far.

Chris: And you mentioned the intellectual ventures lab, so you’ve worked there on, on a, a myriad of different projects. Yeah. Brain surgery tool, a machine to suppress hurricanes, 3d food printers. And yeah, the one I need to ask you about which, which one I’m referring to is the laser that can shoot down mosquitoes.

Chris: You, you gotta tell me about that

Pablos: one. Well, that’s, that’s probably our most famous invention. People love it because there’s just nobody who likes mosquitoes. And so and really almost even the, even pacifists have a death wish for mosquitoes often. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a surprising for a, for like a literal death rate that’s oddly popular.

Pablos: But yeah, that machine we invented. As a way of, of trying to eradicate malaria or at least protect people from malaria. And this is a kind of a sad section, kind of an example of one of the problems that with Americans, they don’t have, they don’t have a malaria to worry about. And so they don’t worry about it, but this is a disease that takes almost a million lives a year.

Pablos: And, and half of them are kids under five years old. And so, it’s a real big problem that humans need to solve. And so anyway, we were lucky to be able to invent technologies, to help eradicate malaria in the developing world, in our lab. And that’s because we were, we were inventing with bill gates and he was supporting those projects.

Pablos: And so one of the cool ones was this machine that could just find. Find anything, moving, aim a laser at it to sample the wingy frequency. And from that, you can figure out if it’s a bug and if it’s a bug, what kind of bug? And if it’s a mosquito, what kind of mosquito, you can figure out what species it is and even the gender.

Pablos: And so if it’s a female, a monopolise Deene, then we can shoot it down with a lethal laser and it can probably kill 20, 30 mosquitoes a second. that’s insane. So the idea is, yeah, you would set it up as a perimeter security around a, a building or a clinic or a village or hospital or whatever. Damn. I need one for my backyard.

Pablos: Everyone knows it for their backyard. Yeah. It’s a, I think the project would’ve been more successful if we had just made the backyard bug zapper and sold it to Americans, think it’s sort of the, the life cycle of technologies is usually that you gotta sell it for a lot of money to Americans. Get the economies of scale up, and then you can afford to go take it to the developing world later.

Pablos: But we, we try to skip that and I, I think it’s hurt the project, but,

Chris: and the driver really puts it in perspective, right. Where, we in the us aren’t necessarily affected directly, although still we’re aiming to rectify a problem for, many, millions of people throughout the world.

Pablos: I, I think it’s well, yeah. And it’s a good example. It was a problem that affected us. So we had malaria in the us, but we eradicated it largely by spraying chemicals that kill everything. So DDT in particular and then, most of the good stuff comes back, but the, hopefully without the malaria, so DDT was a pesticide that worked and we used it a large scale in the us.

Pablos: We got rid of malaria here and then we just stopped working on it, you know? And, and I think that’s a good. Thing for people to keep in mind, which was a technology, the best technology we had at the time, this is in like the thirties, forties, fifties in the, in the Southwest, in the us, it was the best technology worked for us.

Pablos: Wasn’t good enough to solve the problem in the rest of the world. there’s much bigger land mass in Southeast Asia and Europe with malaria that needs to be covered. It’s a much bigger problem. The climate is much more conducive to growing mosquitoes and spreading it. So it’s just, we need to invent new tools for the arsenal and we need to go solve those problems.

Pablos: And I think in the us, we’ve gotten kind of a, despite all the globalization stuff, we haven’t done a good job of trying to solve problems at a global scale. And I think that’s really important to, to course correct on. I’m

Chris: about to fire my mosquito guy. He’s got the spray and pray tech. Yeah.

Chris: needs more prayer.

Pablos: Yeah. That’s not good enough. Yeah. Right. So he’s still trying the old, old school tech. So yeah, look you at this point and we’d started that project in like 2007, there’s a, there’s a make magazine issue that talks about how to make one. I think within arch, we know these days you could probably make your own laser bugs zapper on your 3d printer.

Pablos: And I, I, I think people should get on it. it’s not, it’s not that hard to do motion detection algorithms anymore. And steer laser, just go

Chris: for it, man. Yeah. Just go for it. I wanna talk about hacking for a moment. Yeah. And it’s, and it’s parallel to invention and the public is, as is quick to use hacker and cybercriminal synonymously.

Chris: Although I’m trying to reverse that mindset of people, but correct me if I’m wrong, but you once said. Hackers should be rescued from the security department and redirected to product development, which I thought was a very, very interesting perspective. Would you mind expanding on what you mean by that?

Pablos: Sure. Yeah. I think the, I mean, look, I, I’ve been a computer hacker my whole life, and so that was at first, no one knew what it meant. And then when they did, they were pretty sure it meant criminal. And I, I like to at least pretend like I’m not a criminal. , that’s not what I’m trying to do.

Pablos: But, but, and I, it’s not what I care about for hackers. And the truth is most hackers in, like in the us are not criminals, the economic opportunity for somebody who can. Configure a firewall is, is better than the economic opportunity of stealing credit card numbers and competing with, Romanian hackers who are, who have that covered.

Pablos: So I just think that it’s a, there’s a lot, a lot of the criminal hacking activity is not coming from the us. And the truth is in my mind, hackers, more kind of more narrowly defined. my friends are the people who, they have insanely curious minds, like they’re trying to solve puzzles and computer security problems are just like a, a bottom list pit of puzzles to solve for them.

Pablos: Right. It’s not, they not trying to steal anything. All they’re trying to do is, brag to their friends that they cracked a puzzle before anyone else, that’s what, that’s what I used to be doing. And that’s what we were always doing is like, trying to impress other hackers . And so I think there’s just a, what I love about hackers and this sort of hacker community at large is that it attracts a, a certain type of curious intellect.

Pablos: And those people are really good at figuring things out that, that the rest of the world’s never gonna figure out, they’re good at figuring out what’s technically possible. And that turns out to be where all your new inventions come from. It’s where all your new technologies come from.

Pablos: And you really can’t skip that step. Somebody has to, has to do the thing that was not printed in the directions. right. And that’s so important for humans. It’s how we evolve as a species. It’s how he advances a civilization and we should really be celebrating these people. Who are who are good at discovery and that overlaps with scientists a bit, it overlaps with invention a bit, it’s, these are not, rigorous terms, but, but yeah, that’s what I love about hackers.

Pablos: And, for a long time, I think I saw our best hackers end up at, these big companies trying to like to configure an IDs or something and it, that’s okay. It’s, that’s good. And it’s important. Somebody should do it. And probably all of us should do it for a while, but, but then start thinking about where else can you go with the, that skill set?

Pablos: And it’s sort of less an admonishment of hackers and more for everyone else in the world. most companies don’t realize that they have these, real geniuses in the company who they can’t figure out how to. Relate to, they can’t figure out how to communicate with, and they can’t figure out how to put them to work on something more important.

Pablos: And so I think it’s so in my mind, that’s, that’s, I’m trying to figure out how do we invent new technologies and bring them into the world at a larger scale. And I need those folks as allies, and I need everybody else to see them as allies, in our corporations. I need people to understand that the hackers in the it department are actually the ones who are gonna come up with the next generation of technology that you should be bringing into the world.

Pablos: And, and right now there’s a massive disconnect there. That’s just not a normal thing. Nobody else besides me says that nobody’s even trying, that’s not what’s going on. And so we just have a lot of these gaps to solve and yeah. So that’s how I think about it. I agree.

Chris: A hundred percent, I think. We pigeonhole that term.

Chris: Yeah. And, and even coming into the industry, quote unquote hackers could potentially feel pigeonholed within their own job function as well. So yeah. Yes. I do believe that by allowing that exploration, exploring those other options, that’s how we continue to grow. That’s how we continue to innovate.

Pablos: It has come a long way. I mean, I, I’m probably one of the first hackers to publicly say I’m a hacker, you know cuz in those days, it was synonymous with criminal. Even other hackers would say they were, a computer security professional or something, or, or developer a coder or something.

Pablos: They wouldn’t say they were hacker. So I started that very early and, and, and took a lot of that heat. But now, Facebook and Google have billboards saying they wanna hire hackers, so we’ve come a long way. And I think that’s really good. I think it’s, it’s not like, look, the hackers historically have been kind of poorly socialized.

Pablos: And I think a lot of times hackers took that on as a badge of honor. And, and we optimize for being snarky and, and that kind of thing. And, not haven’t made themselves the most accessible to other folks. And so there it’s, there’s a little responsibility there too, but I think, you got over time and the older you get, the more mature you get, even for hackers, some of ’em eventually learn to like, appreciate other people and their skills even the people in the.

Pablos: Marketing Dr. Department are important, so you gotta, you kind of gotta learn to get along with everybody. And I think that that’s, we we’ve seen some of that and it’s been very helpful. So I’m optimistic that over time, revenge and the nerds will win yes. I’m

Chris: pulling for the

Pablos: nerds.

Pablos: Yeah, me do.

Chris: So Pablos you you’ve been ahead of the curve essentially, since you were a kid. Yeah. You build tech for the future. I have to ask you this and since I’m a back to the future fan, I’m a phrase, it like this. Okay. You and I get a DeLorean. We fast forward 30 years. what does technology look like?

Pablos: Well, I think, I think 30 years is a good window. That one’s a little bit hard. It’s interesting. Cuz 30 years is kind of. two or three generations deep, as far as like funding and tech cycles go. Right. And so it’s hard to predict out there and, and the way I think about it is, I could, I think I can tell you what technologies are coming.

Pablos: It’s hard for me to put them on the calendar, right? Like I don’t, because again, humans can kind of fuck it up in the short run, but in the it’s, in some sense, like a hundred years is easier because all the technologies that we’re developing now that are working that are good. And by in a hundred years, they can be ubiquitous right.

Pablos: In the, in the short run, humans can kind of fuck it up. Yeah. So I think the 30 year window is more of a question of. are we gonna aggressively adopt the technologies that that can make a difference or are we gonna keep bitching and moaning and squandering our lives on season two of Netflix or whatever

Pablos: So it’s just, it’s just that that’s kind of the game you’re playing. But anyway, I think, chief among all, all technologies that are important are the ones that can solve energy, right? Humans are made of energy. Everything we do is fundamentally maps to energy Americans. Right now we get nine times as much energy as the average human, there, there are 3 billion people who live on less energy than your refrigerator uses.

Pablos: And it’s just, that is that if you wanna talk about the problems in the world, inequality, everything, it just maps to energy. We have to solve that. We gotta get the world from five terrats to. and that’s how you, that’s how you make the world peaceful. That’s how you make the world fair. That’s how you make the world, much better.

Pablos: So, so the technologies that can solve energy, we have some awesome ones, nuclear reactors. If we had not outlawed them in the eighties, you probably never, would’ve heard of global warming, right? This is something we could have. We could have prevented. If we had taken this miraculous energy source continued to improve on it, build modern, safe reactors.

Pablos: I’m saying that because we invented a modern, safe reactor at our lab 15 years ago. We’re still not allowed to build it because of the us regulations on nuclear reactors. So I think that’s fucked up. I hope that on the time horizon you’re talking about, we solve that. I’m optimistic that we will. A lot of the things that made nuclear unpopular, those ideas are dying with the, with the generation that outlawed them soon.

Pablos: And my kids growing up in a world where they’re just those, they’re gonna just wonder, like, why the hell aren’t we doing this? It’s carbon free. It scales. It makes sense. It works in the dark and during a snowstorm, like, why wouldn’t you do that? It

Chris: is fucked up cuz you’re looking at regulation,

Pablos: right?

Pablos: That’s right. It’s just humans. It’s not a technology problem. It’s a human, human decision making problem. So yeah, that’s one, I think I I’m interested in space based solar arrays, which is a lot less in people’s consciousness, but solar panels, if you put ’em in space, they get sun 24 7 all year long, they get eight times as much energy and they can beam it down to earth anywhere on the planet.

Pablos: So I think that is a technology that is now is the time to develop and deploy it. I’m very excited about that one. I’m, I’m sort. Less excited about recycling and carbon capture and, and these things, because I think they are that the economics don’t make sense and they don’t scale so well.

Pablos: And it’s important to develop them and, and, and do the best we can. But if you wanna really solve, solve these problems, it’s gonna come down to making a lot of cheap, clean energy. And as this

Chris: technology evolves cyber security’s evolving as well. Yeah. So I assume that our industry is going to continue to grow as well.

Chris: Well, no

Pablos: kidding. I mean, with cyber security, I mean, I remember back in, up until 2001, you couldn’t give away a pen test. no, we would literally go sit. I mean, I have friends, I mean, all my friends working in security, I, I was too at that time, actually, like I would. we would try to go jump up and down, wave our arms.

Pablos: We would literally hack into companies in a mercenary fashion. We would go show them, look, we stole all your shit. Wanna hire us to prevent somebody else from doing that. That’s how, and, and you still couldn’t make the sale so it was, and then in 2001, after nine 11, everybody got security as a line item on their budget and they, and so now companies, as it’s, they’re sort of less about actually making things secure and more about just the, being able to prove that they spent some money and past the buck at check mark.

Pablos: Yeah. Check mark. So I think that’s frustrating, but, but there is obviously a market the market’s full of, Snake oil salesman and a lot of bullshit, but there’s some legitimate things out there and some, and some talented people and there’s, and it’s highly evolved and, and, it’s a war of escalation, so it’s not getting any less relevant and, and we’ve evolved from the, the opportunistic fraud and sort of consumer crap to now very highly evolved, nation, state hacking stuff that, that it’s, it’s, it’s getting very important.

Pablos: So . Yeah. Yeah, so I think

Chris: I couldn’t predict what’s gonna happen next year. It’s so rapid more

Pablos: of the same and worse so,

Chris: and probably cheaper for the attacker. Yeah, probably cheaper.

Pablos: There you go. Theiss that using AI’s on the offense is getting, getting pretty interesting. I would go look at like codex look at Theis that have, that have soaked up.

Pablos: GitHub, like being able to like to automate the ability to find and write exploits off of that stuff. I mean, there’s a lot of lot of exciting frontiers there. and

Chris: that’s a whole nother conversation yeah. Is getting into AI. But alright, last question. And then we’ll wrap it up. Yeah. Time travel. Will that ever exist?

Chris: Oh, . Is that a technology that we’re gonna see in our lifetime

Pablos: now? You’re outta my jurisdiction. No, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think we can do it.

Chris: Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, you’re making science fiction real, so I had

Pablos: to ask, so there’s a, I think there’s an important distinction, there’s, there’s things that require breakthroughs which don’t really happen on a schedule.

Pablos: we do get more and more breakthroughs because our toolkits better, but some of these things, may happen tomorrow and they may happen in a century. They may never happen. And it’s really difficult to. To guess when the breakthroughs are coming, I’m still holding out. Yeah. Time travel, it, it’s probably likely to happen for some kind, very narrow kinds of like information first, but moving you and me around in a, in a DeLorean is unlikely.

Pablos: I can

Chris: see that. Yeah. Cause you’re you have AI predictive algorithms and, and forecasting. So as that improves, as time goes on, you’re gonna be able to predict better, which may yeah. Be able to yeah. In turn predict future happenings.

Pablos: Yeah. Or through some nasty trick of physics, be able to see what variables are coming before they arrive.

Pablos: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. That’s, that’s

Chris: not my it’s not gonna happen in my lifetime cuz I always promise myself I’m coming back to tell myself, oh. And I haven’t told myself yet. Yeah. I don’t think it’s gonna happen.

Pablos: yeah. Leave YouTube videos for your descendants.

Chris: Yes. So publish you’ve ventured the world articulating your visions to others about the future of technology and, and in all of your travels, since this is barcode, I have to ask you this question.

Chris: Sure. Where is the coolest bar you have ever been to?

Pablos: coolest bar I was ever in was in in Tel Aviv. Okay. Do you remember the name of it? It had a Russian name. I forgot the name of the bar. But yeah, that place Tel Aviv is awesome. There’s probably a lot of cool bars there.

Chris: Awesome. Never been there, but it’s on my list

Pablos: now.

Pablos: Yeah, it should be. That’s the most exciting place for anyone into tech.

Chris: Cool. So I just heard last call here. Do you have time for one more? Oh yeah. If you opened a cybersecurity theme bar. What would the name be? And what would your signature drink be called?

Pablos: The bar would be called Cesar’s challenge.

Pablos: We used to have a party at DEFCON called Cesar’s challenge and a hacker named Cesar hosted the party. He had to be pretty late to get into this party, but if you got in Caesar would issue a challenge to everybody at the party and provide unlimited free booze. And the challenge would be like, a, a question like, what’s the, what’s the minimum number of bits required to do remote exploit on a S 400, something like that.

Pablos: Okay. And you’d have all these hackers getting drunk, hanging out, trying to like to solve this challenge. All night long. And what was so important about this is it, it gave, sort of poorly socialized hackers, something to talk to each other about. That was a very important insight that Cesar had is that nerds don’t know how to socialize.

Pablos: So you gotta get ’em drunk and you gotta give them something to talk about. And if you give them something technical that none of ’em are really know a lot about, they can all sort of argue all night. And it’s awesome. So Caesar’s challenge was the best party for hackers that ever existed. this is ancient history now I don’t, I don’t know that.

Pablos: I mean, most of us probably don’t even make it to DEFCON anymore. Although I was there, it was there last. But yeah, it’s that, that, that would be the ultimate cybersecurity bar Caesar’s challenge.

Chris: That that is fucking awesome, man. I love it. I love it. And so would your drink be like

Pablos: the drink would be called oh man.

Pablos: That would be that’s a good one. What would the drink be called? I think it would be called Whopper. Whopper is the name of the giant computer in war games, which was the only, which was the only good hacker movie ever made.

Chris: I love it, man. Hey, Pablo. Thanks again, man. I really enjoyed speaking with you and, and I really appreciate you sharing your, your insights and your visions with us.

Pablos: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks. Good luck and, and really great hanging out with you guys. Thanks man. Take care.

Chris: All right, bye.