3 days ago
Legendary Hacker & Investor Pablos Holman's 1000x Deep Tech Future
Pablos Holman is a hacker, writ large. The first time he spoke for one of my events, in 2010, he captured an audience member's credit card information during a break and started making a purchase on stage. He didn't complete the purchase (or share the number), but he did make his point.
When I'm puzzling over a truly far-out concept or epochal challenge, Holman is one of my go-to experts. He's spent his career hacking humanity's biggest challenges with organizations like Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures. His new book, Deep Future, is a field guide to transformative technology and paradigm-shattering thinking.
Fellow Technologists: 'Aim Higher!'
Holman calls himself a 'Possibilist'—the future can be better, if we decide to build it. That ethos threads the book and echoes a theme I've written about for years: technology as the art of the possible. To do this well requires reframing problems, escaping established paradigms, and doing the hard work of real invention.
Deep Future draws a sharp line between 'shallow tech' and 'deep tech.' Shallow tech enhances convenience. He bluntly proposes, 'If somebody makes an iPhone app to have weed delivered to their dorm room using drones, do we really have to call that tech?'
Deep tech expands human capability by orders of magnitude. Holman challenges us: stop chasing 1% gains. 'Deep Tech is about finding the breakthroughs that make it possible to do things 10x, 100x, 1,000x faster, cheaper or better.'
Mosquitoes Meet Lasers
If you know Pablos, you know about the mosquito-zapping laser invented at Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. The team took apart the malaria problem and tried something new: detect the wingbeat frequency—to distinguish it from other insects—of a female Anopheles in flight and shoot it down. 'We can, and will, eradicate malaria once and for all in our lifetimes. But not by reading the directions,' he the problem, prototype shamelessly and let physics do the heavy lifting. When the approach works—even once—you've expanded what's possible.
The mosquito laser array wasn't intended to go to market. Many deep tech visions are. Read the book for dozens of compelling cases. Here are three.
Deep Future relates the story of Holman's fund investing in Ladon Robotics, a company reenvisioning ocean-going shipping around autonomy and wind. Consider the economics: 'About five out of six dollars spent on a ship during its life is burned as fuel. This industry literally burns most of its operational expenditures.'
Ladon's idea is deceptively simple: autonomous ships powered by wind, with sun-powered battery auxiliary propulsion for navigating harbors and periods with low winds. In other words, remove fuel from the costs. It's classic deep tech. It doesn't 'improve' shipping, it transforms it.
Renewables stumble on intermittency and storage. Holman proposes to ensure the sun never sets on your solar farm. 'Put those solar panels on a rocket ship, blast them into space.' Orbital solar farms could intercept sunlight 24/7, receiving eight times as much energy as they would on the Earth's surface. The system could deliver electricity via radio waves to receiving antennas on the ground, 'even in the middle of the night or during a snowstorm.'
A decade ago, this would have read like a comic book. Falling launch costs and mature RF beam-forming technologies make this increasingly feasible. Holman argues, 'All the technology to do this exists already. No breakthroughs necessary.' It's a plausible path to low-cost power—precisely the kind of paradigm flip deep tech is meant to deliver.
While others have proposed such a solution, Holman's venture firm Deep Future has invested in Virtus Solis, a team endeavoring to make it happen.
Some of the best solutions have been around for centuries.
Consider concrete, civilization's foundation and one of our dirtiest materials. Holman highlights the work of MIT's Admir Masic, which helps explain why Ancient Rome's Pantheon still stands: lime clasts throughout Roman concrete act as self-healing reservoirs. 'When water seeps in, it activates the lime and fills the cracks. It is self-healing concrete that gets stronger with time.'
Longer-lasting infrastructure with 10% - 50% lower lifecycle carbon emissions. With cement accounting for approximately 8% – 13% of global CO₂ emissions, this matters. Unlike most deep tech solutions, this one has thousands of years of proof behind it.
Massive Thinking, Brutal Simplicity
Holman's examples—mosquito lasers, autonomous shipping, space-based solar, self-healing concrete--exhibit how to see differently: select huge problems that matter, don't let current reality get in the way, discover opportunities the incumbents ignore.
While Deep Future is about audacious thinking and enormously challenging technology, much of Holman's thinking illustrates a skill I call 'brutal simplicity.' It's an approach we can all use.
Here are three questions to help you do so:
The first question seeks clarity before seeking solutions. Do we really understand the problem? The second tests whether we have the right problem in mind. The third question challenges us to seek as simple--though not necessarily easy--a solution as possible.
Consider one of Deep Future's examples. Problem: How can we generate clean, reliable electricity at scale? Blast solar panels into space and beam the power back to Earth. Eh, voila: Virtus Solis.
Ignore The Boogeymen: Build Anyway
Big ideas attract bigger anxieties. Holman devotes a chapter to our habit of telling 'boogeyman' stories about new tools—nuclear, psychedelics, AI, you name it. His advice? Research, experiment, invent—then regulate the real risks we discover. The future won't be built by the skeptics. It belongs to pragmatic optimists who make better stories true.
While I wouldn't expect mosquito lasers at your next BBQ, you'll likely discover a lot of you-heard-it-here-firsts in Holman's book. Thanks to the Possibilists amongst us, some of these monstrously hard, brutally simple visions will one day become reality.
