Future Around & Find Out is a Webby Awards nominee for best technology podcast! And it’s currently in second place for the People’s Choice Prize, just behind The Verge, who just joked that they want to win by such a large margin that “it hurts everyone’s feelings.” To which I say… oh, are the big guys scared of this indie podcast? Well (as my kids would say) WOMP WOMP! Let’s make them squirm! Please vote and ask your friends to vote! Voting is only open for a few more days, until Thursday, April 16th!
OK, on today’s episode…
We live in a world where every crisis lands in your pocket the moment it happens. The result? We're more informed than ever — and somehow less capable of doing anything about it.
Inventor and investor Pablos Holman has a diagnosis: we're spreading ourselves across every problem, which means we're solving none of them. His prescription is uncomfortable — pick one thing, go all in, and cut the noise.
Pablos is the co-founder of Deep Futures, where he hunts for inventors tackling world-scale problems: energy, water, food, waste, transportation. Not apps. Atoms. And thanks to advances in AI and software, these "impossible" problems are more solvable than ever — if the right people show up to back them.
In this conversation, recorded at the fabulous PopTech conference, he makes the case that inventors are the most important creative class on earth — and the most invisible. They're undersupported, uncelebrated, and working alone in garages. Some of them are probably going to blow themselves up. Those are exactly the people he's looking for.
We get into:
Why doomscrolling is literally eroding your ability to make a difference
The difference between craft (optimization) and creation (zero-to-one) — and why AI is great at one and struggling with the other
Why you can name 100 musicians but fewer than two living inventors
How solving energy unlocks clean water, sanitation, and climate — essentially for free
Why software people are uniquely positioned to work on the hardest problems in the world right now
Chapters:
01:15 Why the world isn't as broken as your newsfeed makes it seem
03:00 The sticky note exercise: how to pick the one problem worth your time
04:30 Inventors are the most important creative class nobody talks about
07:00 Living inventors you should actually know
09:00 What AI is good at — and what it still can't do
12:30 Why software people are the right ones to tackle deep tech problems
22:56 Energy is the root problem — solve it and you solve a lot else
25:56 Climate change needs a thousand solutions, not one big fix
28:26 The fashion industry's dirty secret and what robots can do about it
And one more time… We are a Webby nominee for Best Tech Podcast!
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Future on…
~ Dan