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

Pablos Holman traces his path from reverse-engineering an Apple II alone in 1970s Alaska to becoming a 'hacker magician' who stole passwords and cracked RFID credit cards live on stage. He argues the hacker mindset, asking 'what can I make this do?' rather than 'what does this do?', should be applied beyond computers to humanity's biggest problems. As an investor he now hunts deep-tech breakthroughs that are 10x better than the state of the art, taking technical risk instead of market risk in trillion-dollar industries Silicon Valley ignores. Recurring themes include solving energy (especially fission reactors) first as the lead domino, self-sailing autonomous cargo ships, and the China-versus-US race in building real industries. He also reflects on long time horizons learned from Jeff Bezos, the value of community, and a 20-year obsession with salsa as reverse-engineered physical communication.

• Holman demonstrated live hacks at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference: spoofing caller ID to break into the AT&T voicemail of organizer Brady Forest, banging open Schlage door locks with a filed-down key, and forcing CNNMoney.com to load a fake story.
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• He read audience members' RFID-enabled credit card numbers on a projection screen using a merchant card reader he simply bought on eBay for $8, after months of failing to break the encryption.
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• He explains the zero-day exploit marketplace: a zero-click iPhone exploit is 'the most valuable thing in the world,' sold through brokers who vet exploits and sell almost exclusively to government three-letter agencies to avoid prosecution.
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• His deep-fission reactor company invented a Toyota-sized reactor buried a mile deep in a borehole, cooled passively by water pressure from gravity; the Department of Energy is pushing them to deploy the first reactors by July.
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• His investment thesis: all software companies combined make about $2 trillion/year against $100+ trillion global GDP, so Silicon Valley serves only ~2% of the economy and the other 98% (energy, shipping, durable goods, automotive) is his addressable market.
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• How he joined the team that became Blue Origin: Neal Stephenson emailed him about a lab going to space; he started helping with computer work, and they explored beaming power from the ground instead of using rockets.
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• The last project he worked on at Blue Origin was a craft with four repurposed Rolls-Royce jet engines mounted vertically as a quadcopter that flew like a UFO and did a vertical landing in the central Washington desert, after which the team committed to building a rocket.
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• He invested in 'nano confinement fusion,' a fringe approach causing fusion by putting deuterium together with carbon nanotubes, betting a small pre-seed check on a wild idea most physicists would dismiss.
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• Holman got one of the first couple thousand Apple IIs ever made around age 9 in Alaska, because Apple courted the oil industry for early customers and his dad agreed to take one.
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• Hacker Samy Kamkar manipulated Google Maps traffic by sending fake phone-location data, making roads he was about to drive on appear jammed so they would clear out.
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• Skateboarder Rodney Mullen, who invented the ollie and modern street skating, grew up isolated on a rural Florida farm with just a patch of driveway cement, paralleling Holman's isolated Alaska childhood.
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• Doubling a ship's size only increases its drag by about 50%, which is why container ships keep getting bigger, but those giant ships clog ports.
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• Happy Meal toys take about 50 days to travel from China to Los Angeles, but only 14 of those days are actually on the water; the rest is spent waiting at port.
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• Holman's signature wraparound titanium glasses were made by Oakley in a Nevada factory that used 425,000 watts to cast a single pair of frames; the factory eventually blew up and no one will make glasses that way again.
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• A hacker named Major Malfunction in England learned, via a car maker's tech support, how to manipulate one brand's remote key fob to unlock any car from that manufacturer within range.
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• Jeff Bezos and Amazon run an invite-only annual conference called MARS (Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, Space) where five to ten Nobel laureates attend without even being put on stage.
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• Holman jokes the reason LLMs were invented was 'to put lawyers out of business,' citing Abu Dhabi already using AI to help draft legislation.
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• Commonwealth Fusion Systems' breakthrough was a new superconductor enabling the world's most powerful magnet for magnetic confinement; but there is only about enough tritium on Earth to fuel such a reactor once.
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