The Sticky-Note Exercise: Pick One Problem

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.

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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

• Pablos Holman on LinkedIn
• Deep Future: VC firm, book, and podcast

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Pablos's first appearance on the show covers his work at Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures. Scroll in your podcast app to July 2025 to find that fun conversation. (Can listen before or after this one; not a prerequisite.)