PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli Pablos Holman has built spaceships, zapped malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a laser, earned thousands of patents, and is now betting his venture capital on the inventors Silicon Valley forgot to fund. His new book, *Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters*, is a call to arms against a tech industry that got drunk on software and forgot about the other 98% of the world. 📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com
PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli
Pablos Holman has built spaceships, zapped malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a laser, earned thousands of patents, and is now betting his venture capital on the inventors Silicon Valley forgot to fund. His new book, Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, is a call to arms against a tech industry that got drunk on software and forgot about the other 98% of the world.
📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com
I grew up in a city full of inventors. They just didn't call themselves that.
Florence in the fifteenth century wasn't running on venture capital. It was running on curiosity, obsession, and the refusal to accept that the way things had always been done was the way they had to be done. Leonardo didn't have a manual. Galileo didn't ask for permission before pointing a better telescope at the sky. They took things apart, looked at what was inside, and put them back together differently.
They hacked things.
That's Pablos Holman's word — and when he used it in our conversation, I recognized it immediately. Not as a tech industry term. As something much older. A way of being in the world that says: the instructions are a suggestion, not a ceiling.
Pablos has had one of those careers that resists a tidy summary. He was writing code in Alaska as a kid, with one of the first Apples ever made and nobody around to teach him anything. He figured it out on his own — and never really stopped doing that. Cryptocurrency in the '90s. AI research before anyone called it that. Helping build spaceships at Blue Origin. Then years at the Intellectual Ventures Lab with Nathan Myhrvold, going after problems Silicon Valley had decided weren't worth the trouble: a laser that identifies and destroys malaria-carrying mosquitoes in flight, hurricane suppression systems, a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste. Six thousand patents. Thirty million TED Talk views.
Now he runs a venture fund called Deep Future, and he's written a book with the same name. The subtitle says what he thinks about most of what Silicon Valley has been doing for the past two decades.
Creating Technology That Matters.
He calls the alternative shallow tech. Apps that replace taxis. Apps to rent a stranger's couch. Apps to have weed delivered by drone. Not useless, exactly — but not living up to what we actually have. And what we actually have, Pablos says, is the best toolkit in all of human history: more people, more education, more resources, more raw scientific understanding than any generation before us. If all that produces another chat app, something has gone badly wrong.
The number he threw out in our conversation — and I'm going to mention it here because it deserves to be mentioned, not as a hook but as a quiet scandal — is that all the software companies in the world combined, every single one of them, account for about two percent of global GDP. The other ninety-eight is energy, shipping, food, manufacturing, construction, automotive. Industries that haven't fundamentally changed in a century. Industries that software can nudge a few percent better but cannot make ten times better.
Ten times better is where Pablos starts. One of his portfolio companies is building autonomous sailing cargo ships — no crew, no fuel, no emissions — targeting a two-trillion-dollar industry that currently burns half its revenue on fuel. He's also continuing the malaria work that could save half a million lives a year, half of them children under five. That's the scale he's measuring things against.
We got to AI eventually, as you do. What he said landed simply and cleanly: chatting is the least important thing we can do with it. What we should be using AI for is understanding things that were previously too complex to model — what's happening in every cell of your body, how to actually get a grip on the climate, how to start solving the problems that have been resistant to every tool that came before. Instead we are using it to generate fake videos and build an AI version of TikTok.
We've hit peak entertainment, he said.
I think that's right. And I think what comes after peak entertainment — if anything does — is the real question sitting underneath all of this.
The conversation ended the way the best ones do: not with a conclusion, but with an invitation. Pick something you care about and work on it. The people who built Apollo weren't all rocket scientists. They were cable layers and logistics coordinators who never saw the rocket up close. But they were part of something that exceeded their own individuality, and they knew it, and that was enough.
That pride is still available.
Whether we want it more than we want another scroll — that's on us.
Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters is out now — find it here.
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Let's keep thinking.
About Marco Ciappelli
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age.
🌎 marcociappelli.com | itspmagazine.com | studioc60.com
About Pablos Holman
Pablos Holman is a futurist, inventor, and self-described "notorious hacker" with one of the more unusual résumés in American technology. He started writing code as a kid in Alaska on one of the first Apple computers ever made, and never stopped following that thread wherever it led. In the 1990s, he worked on cryptocurrency and early AI systems before either had found their way into the mainstream. In 2001, he joined Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin, where he helped explore new approaches to space travel. He then joined Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures Lab, a deep tech invention lab that produced over 6,000 patents — including a laser system that identifies and destroys malaria-carrying mosquitoes in flight, a machine designed to suppress hurricanes, and a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste. His TED talks have accumulated over 30 million views.
Holman is now Managing Partner of Deep Future, a venture capital fund backing inventors working on the hard physical problems the software industry left behind — autonomous shipping, new energy systems, food technology, and manufacturing. His book, Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters (2025), is a critique of Silicon Valley's obsession with shallow tech and an invitation to aim at the world's actual problems.
🔗 LinkedIn | deepfuture.tech/about-pablos
# TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
**Episode Summary:**
Marco Ciappelli sits down with Pablos Holman — hacker, inventor, futurist, and now venture capitalist — to discuss his book *Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters* and the core argument that Silicon Valley has spent decades solving small, software-layer problems while ignoring the physical, foundational industries that the world actually runs on. From his childhood in Alaska with one of the first Apple computers, through co-founding Blue Origin and running the Intellectual Ventures Lab (which produced 6,000 patents, including a mosquito-zapping malaria laser and hurricane suppression systems), to now funding deep tech startups, Holman argues that the entire software industry combined represents only 2% of global GDP — and that the real opportunities, and the real responsibility, lie in the other 98%: energy, shipping, food, manufacturing, and climate. The conversation moves through the nature of the hacker mindset, the failure of venture capital pattern-matching, the misapplication of AI to entertainment, the recycling delusion as a parable for solutions that feel good but don't move the needle, and ultimately lands on a simple invitation: pick something that matters, and go work on it.
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**3 Quotes — Pablos Holman:**
> **On the hacker mindset:**
> "Hackers are kind of the people violating the warranty before they get the shrink wrap off. Their minds are optimized at figuring out what's possible, even if it wasn't prescribed."
> **On Silicon Valley's lack of ambition:**
> "Silicon Valley's biggest wins include disrupting Yellow Cab. What about disrupting General Motors, General Electric, General Mills, General Dynamics? There's a lack of ambition here."
> **On meaning and agency:**
> "Most people are giving away too much of themselves to a machine that doesn't care about them. It's our own choice to decide we're not gonna give it to that machine anymore."
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**3 Quotes — Marco Ciappelli:**
> **On the hacker as universal archetype:**
> "The hacking mentality is related to invention. You can be a hacker without technology. Maybe Leonardo da Vinci was a hacker. Galileo hacked the telescope and made it better."
> **On technology convergence:**
> "We have a lot of technology — but what you're saying is we're not focusing on the right problems. We haven't put it to work towards the right goals."
> **On the Apollo generation:**
> "The people that participated in the Apollo program — not just the astronauts, not just the rocket scientists — they were proud to be part of something that was above their individuality."