"Ocean is the new space" - 7 Wild Ideas for the $3 Trillion Dollar Frontier

0:00 That episode was a whirlwind. Yeah, we just recorded with our buddy Will O'Brien. This episode was like my favorite conversations living in San Francisco, where you run into a weirdo who knows a lot about something you know very little about and you get way smarter in like forty five minutes, your mind gets blown like five times and you just get smarter. So this is a get smarter episode for me. And it wasn't just about like the business and the ideas that he talked about, but the mindset and how he thought about just like the philosophy of life that I was inspired by. Yeah, exactly. So okay, what are we talking about? We're talking about

0:30 How the ocean і the new space. uh how there's companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, all these companies that are doing cool shit in space. He knows a lot about companies that are doing cool things in the ocean, which is something I honestly didn't know anything about going in. Now I'm pretty fascinated with. But then we talked about The conversation toward the end gets really fun. Conspiracy theories, why conspiracy theorists make for great founders, his summer living with monks in Nepal, and what he took out of that. It was the end is really good. So get there to the end. I promise you you will enjoy this episode. I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.

1:04 I'm putting my law in it like my day's all on the road less travel never. And Will is an Irish guy. Hm. Talks my ear off about the ocean. And I honestly wasn't thinking about the ocean at all. Until I saw maybe a tweet of yours which was basically saying

1:23 The ocean is the new space. And how there's companies like SpaceX and others that have built Huge hundred billion dollar plus. Companies. About exploring space, about putting satellites in space, about

1:35 Reusable rockets. And that there's an opportunity for a similar wave of uh Of disruption. For startups in the ocean. And I love that idea. I honestly, I'm never gonna do it.

1:45 So I'll just put that up front. I'm never gonna do something like that. I think 99.9% of people listening to this will also never go do that thing. But just from a I don't know, just as a fan of the game, just as a founder. I kinda love the the theory and the I the intellectual I idea here of what is the opportunity. And then if you're one of the rare few hardcore founders that can go do this, you know, this is gonna be right up your alley. So that's my interest in it.

2:10 Sam, I'm curious, uh, from your perspective, are you the same as me? Dude, I won't even go on a cruise ship. Like like I was at a party the other day and the the the uh Like want liner or the icebreaker was what something you're deathly afraid of. To me it's being in the ocean to where I can't see land. So like I I'm not even gonna be out there. But yeah, I I I agree with your premise.

2:34 And uh Will, uh did I kind of frame your argument right as to like the potential that you see as far as You know, the business opportunity of of building startups that are are focused on on the ocean. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, the framing is like you know, something like this. It's like you know You know, w everyone is like here standing on earth, like looking looking towards um the stars and and and absolutely we we you know, we should be doing that and we should be going like you know full pelt with like trying to go interplanetary, trying to put a base on the moon and take you know take the Take the dark side of the moon and then you know go uh from there and use that as a line coin to go to Maris and we should be trying to fly supersonic as well, but then look, if you're if you're trying to build a startup, like you're always asking yourself, like where you know w what is everyone else looking to do, and like what where where's everyone else going and w where is like underrated? And I suppose

3:21 Uh you know, I grew up by by the seaside in like the in the in the southwest of Ireland. I've always been obsessed with the ocean if I wasn't like on it, in it or near it growing up There was something something wrong in the same way that you're you're afraid some of it. Um yeah, I'm I'm kind of like when I'm when I'm away from it, I I feel something wrong with me. So I've always been been thinking about it and I mean if you just like look at it in like, you know, fundamental terms, like the ocean economy right now is like already massive. It's not like you know the future space economy is gonna be massive. Like the the ocean economy is massive. It's like three trillion dollars in like annual spend in different ways. Right, it covers like seventy percent of the planet. Uh three billion people rely on it as their primary source of food, a billion as their as their primary source of income, and then You know, while we have like you know robots on Mars and you know, these like low cost pr uh drones going in our skies, the technology like in our oceans like still pales in comparison. Like, you know, you look at like the ships that are out there today, like much of the technology is like very same and similar to like what we had years ago, the unmanned, you know, underwater drones.

4:23 are like you know, pretty much like the same as well. They're like the the kind of key core technology stack supporting like the the key pillars of the ocean, whether it be transport, fisheries, defense, energy, you know, biodiversity, all these areas. It's just like it's the same old like stagnant incumbents, large scale incumbents, offering solutions that, you know, are running on like ancient software. And there's just like very little innovation going on there. It's like you know, you you you you you ask someone like what is like a sexy ocean startup and it's like they're kinda scratching their heads for a bit, you know, where's the y ask them about space, it's like SpaceX straight away. It's like you know it straight away. It's like you ask them about aerospace, it's like ah boom. So yeah, this is like the kind of like the the core of the thesis. You just wound him up really easily.

5:05 This is gonna be one of the this is gonna be one of those podcasts that we've had uh We've only had maybe five of'em ever, where at the end of the hour we are like We're no longer podcasting, we're getting into the ocean business. Sam, he's just said a bunch of stats, so Which of those surprised you? So I'm just gonna r rattle a couple back. He said

5:31 All right, this one probably doesn't surprise you. Seventy percent of the earth earth is covered in in water. I think t only twenty five percent has ever been explored. He said a billion people. Rely on Uh, the ocean for the primary source of income. Three billion as their diet. Explain that. Wha what's the diet and the jobs one of the income one? Oh, it's just like people like, you know, most of um I mean the human societies generally settle along coastlines. Like this is like a very like common trend. Um Yeah, but I'm in New York, but I don't eat fish every day. Yeah, but in developed countries it's not as y we've developed logistics, which means you can

6:05 go down the street and walk into some sushi bar and get like, you know, bluefin tuna probably flew in last night from Japan. However, if you are in, you know, Mogadishu or like Somalia or something like that, this might be a bit more difficult because the systems are not set up. So and it's important to remember most of the world does not live in, you know, you know, developed countries. So yeah, mo most humans just live along a coastline, naturally then easiest force source of food for them to get. Is uh fish. All right. So what were some other stats, Sean, that caught your eye? A billion people rely on it for their income. So what are the jobs that you're talking about here? So are you talking about Fisheries, shipping

6:41 Is it? Like defense, like w is that the are those the big three, or am I missing something big and obvious? I the the framing for me how I think about like the ocean economy is like you generally kinda break it up into like three categories, right? Like you have like the biosphere. Right, which is like your fisheries, it's your

6:56 Ecosystem restoration, it's like your environmental mapping, it's um science in the ocean, it's like all around like biosphere management. Then you have like you know the the kind of prosperity oriented part around it. This is like the kind of commercial, this is like your energies, your infrastructures, your oil and gas, your like data infrastructure, you know, these sorts of things, it's your like logistics, shipping. And then you have like uh you know keeping the disease safe, which is like Defense, defense and security, border security, critical infrastructure protection, deploying ships in the South China Sea, these sorts of things. And so give me an example of a startup today. That's doing really well.

7:31 That's based on this kind of ocean economy that you're talking about. Yeah, I mean I think one player that's like interesting in the online systems space that's been around for For a long time, I think over a decade now, um, and was really kind of one of the first players to start doing interesting new things in the ocean is Sail Drone. What problem are they solving? What does Sale Drone do? Um in in in in the ocean problem. They build these like uh autonomous sailboats, these huge vessels

8:00 They look amazing. Yeah, look awesome. They they build these like huge vessels. uh that uh massive sailboats that can basically stay at sea for many, many months at a time. You can put a load of you know, fancy sensors on them s you know, that can take data from the water, that can, you know, gather video footage at the surface and these sorts of things and then relay them back to uh someone like in the United States. It might be like a state a government agency like NOAA who want to know how much fish is in the in in the atlas in the Alaskan in the seas off Alaska.

8:30 they could sell it to the US Navy to know uh you know how deep is the waters in and around Guam or something like that. Um and then they said, yeah, they sell these things as a service. But you know they're they're very interesting founder there. Uh you know, seems like a super sharp guy who's been obsessed with sailing uh for decades. Again, like a lot of these ocean finders that you see they're very, very obsessed with the ocean. It's the very thing people very often get obsessed about and then try to make a business out of it. What's your uh what's your business do, Will? What's Ulysses U Ulysses or Ulysses? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ulysses uh Ulysses were building um a general purpose autonomy platform for for maritime operations. Say that like you're stupid. Just like pr just pretend.

9:10 Pretend that we're stupid. Yeah, yeah. I know it's hard to believe. But just go ahead and Dumb that down for me. Autonomous robots for the ocean to do to do important things. Okay. And w what's one important thing that you would do? You would uh like for example

9:24 You would go to a pipe in the ocean and determine if it's got a hole in it. That that is something you could do. I our first business line has been working with this weird plant that you've probably never heard of. Uh there's this there's a plant in the ocean uh that's probably about ten times more abundant than coral reefs. It is thirty five times better than Rainforest at removing carbon. It supports about Uh it holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean, supports about a quarter of the world's most critically important fish stocks, and and it's called seagrass. It's basically just grass. Yeah. And this plant is dying off at an insane rate all around the world with seven percent loss per annum. If you follow these trends, we lose all our seven percent a year of this

10:07 Thing is going away. Why why is it dying? Is it'cause pollution or w's the cause? There's a few things. I mean water quality is like a very common uh, you know, cause for loss. Uh other things are just like construction, construction um around like coastlines, digging it up, dredging. Changing uh ocean temperatures, changing like ocean currents, these sorts of things impact it. And basically, you know, the the kind of context there is there's a lot of governments in around all over the world like really, really panicking around this. Like if they lose their seagrasses, they lose their fish stocks. If they lose their fish stocks, you have the one billion people who rely on it and three billion people who um you're relying on food and and the billion preferential and you know, they're they're in a they're in a tough situation. And Basically restoring it, i.e., bringing it back is currently a very manual process. And how and how are you guys doing that?

10:57 We're but we build autonomous robots to do it. And you're actually building the robots yourself, or when you said you're building a platform, I thought that meant you're allowing other people to build it and use your technology to like track them. Yeah, so for this first use case, we've built a we've built a kind of custom robotic payload. You know, like when you're when you're starting and trying to do something new, it's kind of important to to kinda get, you know, initial traction in a weird place. And I think if we just built something and hope that people would use it for for something, if we just built the platform, which is like an underwater vehicle and a surface vehicle that that in that dock together. You know, we might have trouble getting traction. But we started off with this initial use case, we've we've basically built these like

11:35 attachments that go onto our under order vehicle that do collecting seeds, planting seeds, measuring their growth to kinda get this initial traction. So you know, in our first year we did a million dollars in in revenue, just kinda like twelve you know, for first first year five pe person team based here in San Francisco. Why would someone pay you to do this? So the reason people pass is because It's you know, it's a critically important like o ocean ecosystem that, you know, if lost uh has these like very negative downstream impacts. Yeah, it's like you know, one reason. Another reason is like lots of c governments and now around the world have implemented laws that restrict uh your ability to damage this plant if you or if you damage it, you have to pay someone to plant it. Uh, so they're paying us to plant it. It's compliance driven restoration. Uh so that's the kind of contract we have contract in Western Australia, we have a contract in Florida, we've contract in Virginia, and they're all kind of for like these general reasons, either compliance driven restoration or voluntary led restoration. S my put

12:32 Uh how important is seagrass? Into chat GPT. Here's what I said. Seagrass is wildly important to the world. And then it basically says it captures carbon thirty five times faster than rainforest, which I think he said. And then it says it's like a baby crib for the ocean. The seagrass basically is where uh small fish, crabs, seahorses, and even endangered uh species and turtles They're born and they live early on in their life. And if lost, then you would

12:57 Uh entire it's a Lose the seagrass and entire marine ecosystems collapse. Yeah. Well what's crazy is You okay, the mission check, like uh on board. Amazing. You kinda skip the headline.

13:12 Sean, did we he he built a robotics business that in the first year you've only I think you I think you said you only raised two million dollars or something like that. So with only two million in funding, In your first eighteen months of business, you did a million in revenue, is that right? Yeah, and just five people as well. Is there something new about building like a Robotics. company today that lets you do it way cheaper? Like did something change? Like, oh, we all use

13:37 Whatever. You know, it's like the when the Raspberry Pi came out. Then it's like oh we can now have this little computer for thirty five bucks or whatever. Uh is there something that does that's made it a lot cheaper, or maybe just the there's more talent? Wha what what's changed? Three D printers has been huge. Like that's just like a game changer. It means just like the speed of iteration has gone up massively. It's you know, it's easier now to get parts overnight as well and just like get like sheet muddle me sheet metal cut and the cost of a lot of things uh has gone down like massively as well, like with like the advent of like Electric vehicles, batteries kind of went down massively, and a lot of electronic components with drones and the motors went down massively in cost. Uh, you know

14:19 For us as well, like a critical enabler of what we do, right, is Starlink. Uh because know the way our system works is like we have this like autonomous boat. It's like a surface vehicle. This is like our mother ship. And then we have a docking system that releases these uh these daughter robots, these like autonomous underwater vehicles to do the actual critical activity in the ocean that you want to do. And uh, you know, we wouldn't be able to communicate with these assets without something like Starlink. You had Iridium before, but like the bandwidth on that wasn't that strong. And so you have like other like kinda

14:51 Wine out uh features like that. And that company you were talking about, Sail Drone, they've raised like over a hundred million dollars. It looks like they're valued five hundred to billion dollars. That's that's interesting. There's another one called Saronic. Sam, do you know Saronic? No, how do you spell it? S A R Oh and I see. And well, you probably know a little bit more about this company than me. I think

15:11 This Joe Lonsdale seeded this company, right? Yes. Yeah. This looks sick as well. So like when we had Joe on the podcast and I was at his house, he was telling me about this company. Should have just invested on the spot. But he was basically like we're dri we're building Drone like

15:26 drones for the water. And you know, drones in the w for defense. Just like Andril's doing it for the sky and and you know m modern warfare has turned into to drone base. They're building these unmanned surface vehicles USVs for the ocean. And they talked about how Did you know this? Like the US Navy Sam, just take a guess. How many ships are in the US Navy fleet? Just What's a number?

15:50 Oh I don't know. Five hundred? Uh what? I it's hard to even say. A hundred? So okay, so you're a lot closer than I thought. I would have guessed that we have thousands of ships. We have three hundred ships in the Navy.

16:01 A is a ship considered like an aircraft carrier?'Cause those are huge, right? Those are like cities. Sure. But Oh my god. But only Three hundred. That's just like a very small number to me. And we have sixty seven submarines.

16:14 That's it? Sixty seven. Dude, I had more kids at my three year old birthday party. That's insane to me. So we got three hundred ships or whatever, and basically every ship is like uh I don't know the exact cost of it, but let me let me pull. I think they're like Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but like the average cost of these is something like

16:35 Or maybe it's the average cost of these contracts like two hundred fifty million dollars. Every time you get contract to do one of these. And so you're a startup like Saronic. And you're all you have to do is basically say, All right, we're gonna come in, we're gonna build the most innovative, autonomous Vehicles here. And

16:51 We're gonna operate you know, what Anderil did was was remarkable. So what Anderil did was In Silicon Valley, the smartest tech people, nobody was working on defense. Google had famously shut down its defense project and defense was taboo. Like you're gonna make weapons. That was not cool. at the time and it was there was basically zero uh zero weapons uh startups in San Francisco. And what they did was they said, We're gonna do this.

17:17 We're gonna use the Silicon Valley method and talent to do this. We're gonna change the cost structures to all the big defense primes. We're operating on what's called cost plus model. And so their incentive really was to have Really high cost.

17:30 operations because they were making ten percent on top of whatever the cost was, right? So the incentive model is sort of screwed up. And that's how you get, you know a single airplane that's like a billion dollars or something like that to to get made. And so it was costing the government a lot. These guys had no incentive to innovate, no incentive to cut costs. And they were using talent that was not the smartest engineering talent in the world, which was all centered in Silicon Valley. And then Andrew comes out, Paul Molucky and Trey and others, they basically came out and what they said was

17:58 We believe this is important. We believe that America needs this, and we believe we should put the best talent in the world on this problem. And they've built now uh twenty to thirty billion dollar company. Doing this. And the reason I find this exciting is that

18:12 I love these huge opportunities that are hidden in plain sight. I talked to a friend recently who knew Elon and I said, What was Elon like? Were you impressed with Elon? He goes, I was impressed with Elon, but not because he was the smartest guy in the room. You know, we would be at a party, there's twenty people, you couldn't say, Oh my God, that's the guy. He goes, but the thing that Elon did better than everybody else. Was that

18:31 Elon looked down at the ground and saw a trillion dollar opportunity that was just sitting there. Yeah, before Elon, it's not like There were a bunch of people trying to build uh you know, rocket companies. Or electric car companies.

18:44 It wasn't like they were trying and failed and he succeeded. They weren't even trying. And he goes, the beautiful part about Elon is that he saw those and he didn't ignore it like the rest of us. And he that that idea of let's go to Mars was there. It was available to all of us and we were all blind to it. And so similarly I think Anderill did that in the defense space. And now it looks like Saronic is basically doing that in the um

19:06 the sort of ocean defense space where Yeah, you have this combination of Elite talent at Robotics and AI and autonomy, and you pair it with this old industry.

19:18 And I think you have a pretty unique window to build a very big company doing this. Yeah, like they're they're building um I I think of it like they're building the Humvees and we're building the Toyota Hylexes. Right. Like they're building like these like ultra fast, like defense focused, like vehicles, and and like they're you know gonna make the South China Sea a hellscape and make China not want to cross that um that that that ocean and keep Taiwan safe. If they keep going on the path they're doing and they're doing like incredible job at that. Uh and then we have like we occupy like a different niche. Like we're like we just want like every single like

19:52 you know, day to day task that is like done at the one we want it done like on our platform. And so like we want like all the servicing done by like Ulysses platforms and these sorts of things. There's like a lot of things that are making the ocean like very important in this century more than previous ones. Like warfare is a good example. Like every other single war we've fought in the last like Three decades until now, he's been in like in a desert. Right. Now we're going to the ocean. That requires like a complete retooling of the military. You know, and you just even how we think about warfare is needs fundamentally needs to change. Like the climate question? is ultimately.

20:24 an ocean question. Like the ocean is like the world's largest natural carbon sink. It is like where most of the life on earth lives. It is uh you know one of our biggest sources of like food in a world where like a population is growing and food scarcity is always a question. Even just like you look at AI, right? Like the data infrastructure build out for AI is going to be like enormous, right? And basically that's gonna require More data infrastructure, i.e. Like cables. Connecting different parts of the world, transmitting data. We're going to need more data centers. We're going to need more energy. These are all things like.

20:57 We're we're already putting and testing putting data centers in the ocean. The cooling costs go down massively, they become like more efficient. So well let's let's go back. So there's There's already pipes under the ocean that basically f like internet pipes under the ocean, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean most of the most of the the information that Try our our internet connection now is mo most of that is like travelling through is traveling underground. Who built that? Is that the government built that or Google built that? Who who put that Who put those pipes in the ocean to do that?

21:25 A lot of the initial infrastructure build out for for For IT in the ocean came from telecoms companies, actually. Yeah, like in the eighties, Sean, tel so there's a handful of telecom companies that were startups and they're some of the fastest growing companies in the world. So like imagine the AI companies today that are scaling to a hundred million in revenue in uh a year. That was Did they die or what happened? And then there was uh some of the you know, if you look at like what are the biggest frauds on earth, uh like it's like Bernie Madoff, and then like the third one is actually one of these telecom companies that was laying Pipes in the in the uh in the ocean.

22:01 But a lot of them are still around. They're just like small B to or they're not small, but they're B to B companies that you wouldn't even know, but they can be like a ten billion dollar a year company. But in the eighties, right? Well, or maybe you I don't know if you know the tip I but in the eighties, that was like the the birth of a lot of this, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, massively. And and and now you're seeing a transition to the building being coming from Fine from like big tech. Uh and soon I think it'll be like the the AI companies. So what you're saying will now is that AI companies need these data centers. Just a yeah. Huge amounts of GPUs.

22:33 In a data center. And those data centers need cooling, they need power, they need tons of things, and they need to ideally they need to be close to Places where people are using it. And what you're saying is that somebody's gonna build a data center in the ocean or people are already building data centers in the ocean. And why uh who's doing that or uh or is this a future idea and why are they doing that? Why is that a good idea? Yeah, so I think the first experiment of this was a Microsoft project. They did it. There's a Y C startup as well, run by uh friends of mine, uh Sam Mendel.

23:03 He's got a company called Network Ocean, they're building and operating starting to building and operate these things. Are they actually under water or are they on top of the water? Just out in the ocean. And again, like these are the sorts of businesses that like Ulysses we want to be the kind of servicing partner for in the future. When they need maintenance, when they need like inspections done, when they like it's like us they're coming to and we're selling them like a kind of in the box solution to it. I think the the biggest opportunity In

23:29 This like You know. paradigm in the future where more and more data cables are being laid sub C is actually in the protection of them. Right. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with what's going on in like the Baltic Sea and places, but like I think in the last year about eleven cables have been cut by foreign actors, and like And and these cables, by the way, they're like uh it's like a human sized tunnel, right?

23:50 Are they on the ocean floor or are they like floating in the ocean? Like to say cable, we're not talking like a like a rope that you're pulling. It's like a it's like a tunnel, right? And I'm like, okay. Like literally the the like the Chinese are literally publicly advertising these cutters they have. These cable cutters, right? They're literally putting in the South China morning press, China unveils powerful deep sea cable cutter could reset the royal art. They're not even

24:15 They're not even fucking hiding this. Like they're they're cutting the cables. They're like yeah, we're just look how big our cable cutter is. Like this is just like the new paradigm. And then like, you know, they send these like little like uh you know Taiwanese ships into the or these Chinese ships into the Baltic Sea on like fishing missions. Right. Like what the hell are they doing in the Baltic Sea on fishing missions? Like they're clearly just cutting cables and then like two days later, oh cable cut. I won't. Dude, calling calling this a cable cutter is like calling a rowbo a ship. You know what I mean? Like maybe technically it's it's correct, but they need to rebrand this because what you're showing us is basically uh Like a huge submarine. You know, like I'm I'm thinking like a Clip.

24:53 Yeah. This is insane. So they're going down and they're cutting this and what does that do? Like Uh, does a country lose internet or is it just like damage it? Okay, I'll I'll give you this vision, right? So these cables run between like military bases as well, right? And Okay, let's say there's like a a hot war breaks out in like the South China Sea, right? first target then is gonna be like a military base in like the Pacific, somewhere like Guam, right?

25:17 What if you if you want to like completely scramble what you know, their understanding of and situation awareness of what is going on, you are gonna be laying sending these subsea drones down there to go and cut the cables that is giving them like comms, that's giving them energy, and you're gonna be like scrambling their airwaves with like, you know, electromagnetic uh interference. And that's how you're gonna like just completely prevent like American military responses in the in the Pacific, right? But how many how many cables? Like um we're tr you're talking to two dummies. How many cables does America rely on?

25:49 There's there's like not actually that many, right? Like is in like there there's like an insane amount of data that goes over them, but there's only about like six hundred active I'm so impressed that you knew that number. That's insane to me. So th there's not a lot of redundancy you're saying. No, no, not at all. Like they're in they're very difficult to lay, right? You need to respond quickly. So yeah, like I mean there's like many critical things that rely on them, but like yeah. You're you're way better off defending them with unmanned water drones than trying to lay back up pipes down there and leave them undefended, of course. Like century style, in the same way that like Android, like have the you know, started with these like border systems to like see what was coming in and over like the land border. Like we need the exact same type of systems out at sea, like permanently just sitting there on top of them. They need to be cheap so that you can deploy them massively at scale. The the ocean is huge, so they need to be cheap to be scalable. You need to be able to see what's going on at the surface and you need to be able to see what's going on sub surface. And and that's funny, that's like the platform that that we've developed where you have this like surface vehicle

26:53 the docking system that can drop it an underwater vehicle and we've made it like all by ten times cheaper than anyone else. So like that's you know Sea grass is like a nice place where we started. Um how how deep do your vehicles go? Do they go to like the bottom of the ocean where these pipes are? So for the Baltic Sea, I mean it's w it's one of the shallower seas, and this is like a major the major kind of like um you know, uh activity uh area of activity where this is going right now. So our our vehicle works in that sea, uh you know it all dead profiles in that sea. So for the Baltic Sea part of it, it is uh

27:23 It it it works. When you got into like Narlier parts of the ocean, like some of the Pacific, where you're getting down to like 8,000 meters, right? Like Mount Everest, you know, levels of depth. We can't go there yet. It just started getting difficult, but like Yeah.

27:37 Uh we will be adding future vehicles to the feed that can that can be. How old are you will? I'm twenty seven. Sean So when you and I moved to San Francisco in well, I moved there in twelve and we're about the same age, it was the sharing economy. That was the thing. So it was Airbnb and Uber and Lyft were the winners, and then there was a bunch of derivative things like Airbnb for garages or or you know, or for storage. A few years later, it was AI or uh uh crypto. So like Bitcoin and Coinbase were winners, and then there was a bunch of like silly things.

28:05 Uh right now It this is so strange to me. It's AI, but it's also, well, it's whatever category you guys would go in. You're not quite defense tech, but it's like wild to me that this shift has happened because ten years ago I would have told you like you know, that was when boom supersonic was starting and a few other things. I would say this is This is foolish. What are you guys? We're technology this is a technology city. Why don't you do like software? It's to hear you say this, it's so foreign to me. It's also so interesting.

28:32 For me it's like a a no brainer. I mean like uh you know, the low hanging fruit of software has been eaten. Right. You guys like uh like how many more CRMs are there? Yeah, exactly. The the boomers got cheap real estate, you guys got like B2B staff, right? Like it's like that's like and now it's like on us to do like something where like the next frontier is, which is like fundamental hardware. And then like also it's like it's like a no-brainer. You look at like the top ten most valuable country uh companies in the world right now, it's like seven out of ten of them have like A hardware, like an extreme like hardware component, right? Like the biggest companies being built today are hardware companies. And also in a world where you can just like vibe code overnight, like a C R M or a a sales for or not maybe not salesfor, but like a Calendly competitor. It's like okay, well, is there really a mode in like these sorts of things anymore? It's like Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. And I think it's so fascinating because

29:24 It so when Sean and I lived in San Francisco, if if someone who looked like you so you look you're wearing a Ford Bronco shirt. I bet you you're wearing cowboy boots and you got a little bit of swag to you and you like if you would have if you were to talk about what you're talking about, it would have been like You're you're so out of touch. You're out of touch for the for the for the Y C group of out of touch people. Like it it's just so interesting to me and I think it's great. So th there's a I did a podcast with James Career and he has this Sam, did you ever see this part? No. Technology windows. So he basically says all right.

29:57 There's a reason. There's a there's a Almost like a scientific reason why it why what you just described happens. happens. And so he basically says like When a wave of startups comes out, it's because of a technology

30:09 Change. So yeah, for example And inflection. So when we you were s you're right, when we first moved to San Francisco, I moved in twenty twelve. And the mobile window was open. And that's when Instagram, Uber, Snapchat, like a bunch of companies got built that relied on you having a computer with you at all times that had internet connection, that had an accelerometer, that had a map uh GPS uh feature in it, and then all these companies could get built.

30:34 But That window opens for a very like a a fixed amount of time and basically like you said The low hanging fruit all gets eaten. And so he he went back all the way to the railroads and he's like the railroad technology window was open for forty years. And I like if you just look, there was not another successful railroad company after that forty year period. And um because all the opportunities basically got eaten. Automobiles was twenty five years. And so in a twenty five year window, you got Buick, Dodge, Ford, Cadillac, GM, Chevrolet, Lincoln, Chrysler

31:01 All of it within a very short window. And then you had nothing for another About eighty years. And then the window reopened. Because of battery technology. And you got Tesla and Rivian.

31:13 And so th that was a almost like a new technology window around automobiles. Because the tech had changed again w around batteries. And so he was basically saying like B to B SAS has had a twenty year window. And now AI software, AI starting in twenty sixteen, and that's like the current window that we're in. And I would say, you know, what Will is doing and what a lot of

31:31 smart entrepreneurs are doing right now is they're in the technology window. Of AI. Robotics and three D printing. And basically those three technologies have have opened up. the door to build new things that couldn't have been built. Ten, fifteen, twenty years ago.

31:45 So this is what a technology would look like. So just check this out. If you're on if you're on audio, you have to be on YouTube to see this, but I'm I'm sharing my screen here. So It basically says like step one, the technology is invented and only the hobbyists are playing with it out of interest and creativity. Right. And then two is the status moment. One of the hobbyists achieve status and wealth using the tech. So you know, for example, So this is like, you know, Mark Andreessen on the on the cover of Time Barefoot.

32:11 Because The hobbyist internet guy. became rich b by building, you know, the browser. And then this happened again with social networking. This happened again with Elon and Paul Marlucky and all those guys right now who've who've had their status moment where You know, Palmer was like literally like living in a

32:29 R V. Building VR headsets for like ninety bucks using spare parts. He was a hobbyist and then the hobbyist got the wealth the status moment when he sold to Facebook for three billion dollars.

32:41 And then, you know, same thing with Elon. Elon was building in relative obscurity, both open AI Uh, you know, opening I was a nonprofit. It was relatively obscure for the first five years that it was out that they were doing their thing. But now Sam Altman and and Elon and Palmer again with Angela. Have had a new status moment. And then there's What he calls knowledge diffusion, which is

33:01 Suddenly there's conferences, there's podcasts like this, there's newsletters, there's Twitter where people are sharing ideas about how to do this, what's going on, and you get this explosion of stuff. And then competition. Floods. And then the new incumbents are born. And then then the new incumbent regime takes over due to their their defensibility. Like they build something that is defensible, maybe because it's hardware, maybe because it it requires scale, maybe it has a network effect, and the technology window clothes is ninety percent closed, and you'll only have a few exceptions from there on out.

33:32 It's so funny to Sean, uh and w to meet Will, who's like in the thick of ex actually what you're describing. Yeah. Will when did you start? We like Were you a hobbyist and when did you start with doing what doing what you're doing? Like when were you messing around with drones or ocean tech? So yeah, I mean like I like as I said, I've been like you know, i in the ocean, on the ocean, near the ocean since as a kid, diving, um

33:55 Surfing uh you know, whatever weight boarding, all these sorts of things growing up, but never never had built in it really before this kind of scooter sharing startup uh thing popped off. I was like, you know, working um, you know, in that my co founders all kinda had been tinkering and uh and these sorts of things. But again, none of us had ever actually really done anything in the ocean, which I actually think is a massive benefit, right? Like because none of us came in with these preconceived notions for how like subsea drones should work. You know, my you know two of my co-fenders were building aerial drones uh in a drone delivery startup before. So they took like a lot of the primitives from that. One of them had worked on self driving cars, took some of the like ideas from that. But again, I think there's like definitely this like idea that I agree with that like you know to really actually shake up an industry, you it's probably good if you don't come from it because we came to it and like

34:46 You know we we thought initially that we were gonna be maybe using someone else's platform and repurposing it, but we looked at all of the subsea drones on the market and they were crap. They cost like you know, they were like one of the ones we were looking at, which like actually had the specs that would have met what we wanted to do cost like five hundred grand. That's like a quarter of our pre seed to do what we want. Like it's like and then like My m my R C TO Jamie, uh, he just like went into a cave for a few days and just like came back with like a a design for like a a new type of like autonomous underwater vehicle. And then we like test it and we're like, Oh shit, this works. Oh shit, it's like ten, twenty times cheaper than like anything we could have bought. You know, so it's like Sometimes you just need like a a new idea and like a an artist to go into a cave and then you can uh you can like change things. That's how uh all the great things that's how all the biggest problems have been solved. This is like I mean all religions like Muhammad went into the cave, like Jesus went into the desert, you know, like all these like prophets, like they go off into the old and then they come back with like this like secret, and then you know, someone else spreads the word for them, right? Like it's like St. Peter does it in like the Catholic Church and like

35:51 Oh, there's so yes, this is a a common archetype that and Yeah, that does work, yes. You you said something earlier about um How a billion people rely on the sea for their food. Has anybody done You know Food or like

36:07 tuna or salmon in a way. Are they doing anything interesting there with like Whether it's like lab grown or or something innovative. Yeah, yeah. My my friend's got a very very interesting startup called Wild Type, which is like sustainable sushi grade salmon. So basically that's like cultivated seafood. And so their first product, like their what do you mean by cultivated? It's grown. It's grown. It's not like farmed in or or caught at at sea. Like grown in a lab or grown with it. Yeah, like in a yeah, exactly in this like industrial um process. Yeah, they can basically grow cells um and then put them together in such a way that it tastes like sashimi grade salmon. So, you know, in the same way that Elon started off with like a a sports car, right? They're starting off with like uh a s you know sashimi grade salmon, the highest end salmon to get. And I've tried it. It's great. This is in San Francisco? It looks like a

36:58 Brewery. Yes, exactly. It's like similar ideas. Um I mean. Look breweries are like Where so much of the like best um kind of biotech uh innovation has like come like from people building like mass industrial processes for um, you know, cultivating food for like a very long period of time, in fact. So you're telling me that someone is growing salmon that I can go eat right now.

37:23 Yeah, yeah, I mean I got it through through my friend. I don't know if they're in stores yet. Um they're still going undergoing uh FDA approval. But like yeah, no none of these nasty heavy metals or microplastics in them. Uh you know, it's r reducing pressure on fish stocks. Uh you know. This is this is good stuff. It doesn't have any of the nasty like parasites that you get in some of this like farm salmon as well. Uh

37:48 So Yeah, definitely I think Think the things like this will be. Would be important. Holy shit. This is crazy to me.

37:56 This is crazy. Is it like the lab grown meats where It's like ten thousand dollars an ounce. It's like it tastes it we can we made you either pick, you either have the cheap thing like beyond meat or impossible foods. But it doesn't taste great or it's not good for you. It's made with a bunch of chemicals. Or

38:12 You have the real thing, but it's super expensive and so nobody can afford it. Um Well I think even that like uh my friend shared it with me that it it's not that expensive. Uh but uh it's You're not that good a friend. Exactly, yeah, are you? But I think this stuff is like sooner than we think. It's around the corner. Wow, these guys did a hundred million dollar series B in twenty twenty two. That's pretty crazy. What uh what else is cool, Tom Tom Well, tell me everything. What the guys like you are into. Like uh some more ocean shit.

38:42 Some crazy ones. Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. This one is is wild, right? Buckle up. Okay. Ocean treasure hunting, right? So there is actually uh like, you know, hundreds of wrecks out there in the ocean today, uh that potentially have like more than a billion dollars on them, right? Like gold bullions that like the Spanish were bringing back from their conquests, and then you know they got hit by a storm. Or these sorts of things, right? And there's like probably thousands that have like millions of dollars of funds in them, right? So Governments

39:12 the the source governments so like the Spaniards or the Portuguese still have claim on these things. However, there is precedent in history for you to do these kind of like profit sharing agreements where it's like if we find that and we restore we give you back all your artifacts, we give you back everything, but you know we sell some of them, we get to we get can we can we keep some? You can do this, right? It's like these uh Sass. negotiation c companies were like, hey, if we go and save you money on your vendors, we get a cut. We keep twenty percent. It's that except for you go to the Spanish Royal Government and you're like Hey there are s if we find any hidden treasures in the ocean, can we keep a couple bars for ourselves? Exactly round for piracy. Who's building this? So one my my friend used to do this, uh his name's Chip Forsyth.

39:56 Uh and he would be like, Hey, I'm going off the coast of whatever to go Bro, you did not have a friend that used to do this. That's insane. Chip Forsyth. Do you know um He w he went off the coast and just what, scuba died for what was he doing? It was Chip and AJ Forsyth, who I think you've met, AJ, he's crazy. His brother Chip They basically the way it works now is It's kinda like a movie, like you have these crazy people and you get other people to finance it and you say, If we find this treasure, you know, here's the agreement on how we split it. And they would go off the co they would somehow narrow in on where they think it is. They would spend a week trying to find it, and most of the time you don't find it, but occasionally you hit the lottery. Is that I mean, is that right, Will, how it works now? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. Um so there's like fundamentally two parts of like a mission. It's like Or three parts is like

40:39 There's like you know the pre mission, uh, you know, you know, negotiating Like you know, looking to restore the records to see like where we think it could be, you know. kind of scoping it out and also getting permission so that when you do the recovery, you have like some chance of being able to hold on to it. Then there's like this kind of scouting where you're actually on site and you're doing like scouting and you're like basically using sonar to scan the the C bed and understand what's there. And then there's like recovery where you're bringing out these like gnarly like JCB style ROVs and remote operated vehicles that go down and just like dig it all up and bring it back up and And you have your party. And is anybody doing this? Like has anybody uh do you know someone who's like made like

41:18 Ten million dollars finding treasures in the ocean. I I know some people working on this that haven't like shared their plans publicly yet, so I won't like share, but there is like some exciting developments coming in this um space that that we we may or may not be helping with. Did did you did you say there's three million Shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean? Um I'm not sure specifically on like a total amount of shipwrecks. I wouldn't be surprised if there's like that many shipwrecks, but there is like there's like hundreds that potentially have billions on them. Okay.

41:48 Okay, I'll give you like a banger quote, right? There's this like Canadian billionaire. Called Ross, who had this call of fury as he said Give me a a tanker of o iron filings and I will give you an ice age. Right. What he meant by that is like you can actually alter like the kind of weather of the earth by like dumping iron into the ocean. Right. So so basically like many many parts of the um the ocean are

42:12 Uh low in iron. They're they think they they need more iron. And if you add iron to these parts of of the ocean, you stimulate like algae growing at the surface. Algae then draws down carbon and then the fish eat it and then the fish die and they fall to the bottom of the sea. And then so the carbon goes from the air into the bottom of the ocean, right? So this is like generally good because there we have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We also want more fish, but You need to balance it because you don't wanna put too much in and then just like there's too much salmon and then there's like salmon take over like the you know, the certain like ecosystem which is maybe like not good or something like that. Or you know, there's a basically when you're doing stuff in in in in like with ecosystems, three It's very like difficult to predict how things were gonna patterns. So this dude

42:57 Um didn't wasn't did do it that carefully. It went out like off the coast of like Vancouver, partnered up with these like Native Americans, and just did like this experiment uh where he just like basically dumped off a load of iron filings. removed through his quantifications like thousands of tons of uh of of of carbon there off the coast there that year. They had like the biggest like take of salmon ever um as a result. And but the kind of uh D Cao authorities did not like his experimentation and like the Can Canadians Gulden of like the CIA like busted his home and uh he got like yeah, like a warrant and uh yeah, he got in a lot of trouble. So people haven't really done it since then, because he kind of got like, you know, he was the kind of first crazy, maybe like the first hobbyist to do something like this at scale. But I think there is g going to be like a billion dollar company built in like Uh Marine Geoengineering of some description.

43:45 There's this um So I'm I'm I'm Catholic. So it's like there's this like my lot of my beliefs around like ma environmentalism and stuff like that comes from the like this Christian no notion of stewardship that like we should like look after our lands and our seas because it's like our duty to and I think this is like kind of like where we're going with like how we we manage the climate. Like climate used to be this kind of let's like avoid the worst case scenario and it was just very like kind of like let's like stop emitting carbon but like I think there's like a more interesting idea of like this like stewardship I think of environmentalism where we actually just like control you know we we we steward the planet, right? We like we take control, we get involved we you know, someone like a ghostess, a rainmaker can make it rain when we want it to rain. You know, someone like US can come in and bring back the the the seagrasses when we need the seagrass. You know, someone could like you know, when we want to draw down carbon can do like or increase fish stock somewhere. We could just like do a bit of this I think it's gonna we're gonna have to build these tools, right? Because

44:40 These we need these in tandem with growing the size of the economic pie if we want to keep doing that. We don't want to just like shut down the um economy. We don't want to like just stop doing like emissions altogether. It's important for us to have these other kind of compensatory mechanisms. And yeah, I think Marine Geoengineering is like an interesting and like Underexplored space. I think main things we need to get right there are science. Better science on it. um better technology And governance. The governance about it because the ocean is like a public space. It's like

45:09 You know, you just need to get the governance power right. Have you seen, Sean, have you seen this guy, uh Augustus? Uh the founder of Rainmaker. Incredible mullet. Oh my god. So there's this whole cohort of people of which Will appears to be one of the like You know, class presidents.

45:28 Where there's this like They're very strange. They don't fit this stereotype that when you think of a tech entrepreneur, they're like kind of manly man, or they're try like they're not the they're not like this engineer, like typical thing that you and I grew up with, Sean. Like there's something about them That is different. And I can't tell if you guys are gonna take over the world and be billionaires, or if you're gonna go broke, but it's only gonna be one of the two.

45:53 Do you understand, Sean, like this this new genre that I'm trying to describe? I don't I don't know exactly what I'm what I'm saying. Well, maybe you can like put words to it, but there's this new like breed that that I think Austin and San Francisco had a baby. You get the the stash in the mullet of Austin, and then you get the insane ambition And tech pr tech chops of S of Silicon Valley, and that's what's happening. For example, this guy uh uh Augustus, I think his Abbas he ha he's on the cover, I think, of Forbes or something, and he's sitting on a On a bench press. Like a like with

46:25 Like a like a working out. That is not something that Brian Chesky or uh you know Travis Kalinick would have done in two thousand and twelve. I think it's emblematic of like um of kind of the evolution of the technology industry though. I think like, you know We we began like is this kind of like hippies that found computers with people like Steve Jobs, we were like actualizing on like the axis of like the spiritual uh you know realm. And then it was like, you know, you had like people like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg who were just like nerds, like actualizing on the sense of like mind, you know, they were like smart and nerdy. And now you have like people who are like openly flexing on like were actualizing on the sense of of the body, right? Like we're like becoming strong. And like you have like this like full integration of like mind, body, and spirit. And it's like no wonder that this like

47:05 tech becoming like fully actualized on all of the access to like that a human needs to develop on is happening at the exact same time where you have like Elon, who is like chief tech bro in the fucking White House, right? Like these things it's like no coincidence to me. It's like tech is like Found its voice. It's like found itself, it's like self confident and it's like ready to like actually change the world now because it's like it's you know it's it's like spiritually like aligned. It's like mentally they're you know we're smart and like we're like now uh like a strong group of people as well who are taking health and fitness seriously and it's like yes I this is why I think like we're at like the the most interesting time In technology right now. I like that. Poetic.

47:43 You know, last night I watched a uh a clip of the final scene of Ratatouille. You seen that, Sam? No. It's a great movie. And the final scene about it too is the the critic The critic who who's is the the most fearsome critic in in all of uh the town writes the review about the restaurant or the rat has been cooking. And he just gives us beautiful

48:04 Monologue. Maybe the bet maybe the m most beautiful four minutes in all of film is the last four minutes of Rad Ratatouille here, the monologue. Will, I think you're up there with the last four minutes of Ratatouille there with your mind, body, and spirit analogy for tech. I I think that's kind of amazing. I've actually heard that before. With Just the technology part of it. So it's like you had The initial

48:25 You know, the bicycle for the mind. So you had Steve Jobs talking about how the how computers will enable creativity. And then you had You know, sort of AI. It's like, oh, we gave computers a brain, and now they can think for themselves. And then with robotics. in self driving cars. It's like we gave the computers a body so they can move around and pick up things and do things. And I like how you uh you extended that to to, you know, the the entrepreneurial will. Look at Bezos and Zoomberg, they're getting jacked. Like they're doing TRT. They look like look like this is like uh I think it's true problematic of like the spirit is in technology now. It's like you have the like yeah, one of my favorite podcasts besides yours, you know, the tech bros

49:02 And like what Jordi and uh and John are doing there. It's like they're like they're you know the the technology brothers, they're like leaning into the fact that they're like tech brothers. That used to be a slur. Right now it's like Oh, I'm confident in it. I'm like I'm owning it. And they're like doing these like hilarious promo videos of them like sipping Dom Perignon. Like it's like there's like a confidence and an air of like Okay. Let's do it now. You know, we're not like we're not gonna be like uh like the events and functions anymore kinda lying about what you're not not neutered. Dude, listen to that neutering yourself. I got an email from this guy named Jamie at the Wall Street Journal.

49:35 So Jamie w uh is uh a reporter for Wall Street Journal's style team and he listened to this He goes, I'm writing a story about tech guys embracing cowboy clothes in the past recent years. Uh, and I wanna write about how the Tech Bro uniform has changed from quarter zips and all birds to denim shirts Cowboy boots. And uh like when I saw this and he said tech bro, I was like

50:01 Uh, that's amazing. I was like, I don't think I could talk like it's this is not gonna be. Life win that he thinks you're the expert to go to, right? Yeah, life win. But I was like I'm I'm not exactly a tech, but that's amazing that you think that I like I am a fashion influencer, officially. No. Uh reply. Mission accomplished. Dude, that's amazing. And and you're right, like

50:23 Dude, is there any difference? The first time you saw Zuck Doing M A. Do you remember when that video came out? Is there any difference between that video and the first time you saw like a Boston Robotics or Boston Dynamics dog like robot dog getting kicked and like jumping around and

50:39 Like doing back flips and shit. Like there's no difference between the two videos. Where they were when they saw it. Wow, I didn't know the robots could do that. That's how I felt watching Zuck. That's how I felt watching Boston the Boston Dynamics robot. Well, uh uh One line of last questions. Um can I invest? Yeah. Yeah, great. Okay, cool. Cause I think this is awesome. I uh

51:03 You guys are You guys are insane, man. This energy is so wild. I'm not convinced that it's gonna end one like okay, so on one hand It it goes both ways. So on one hand there's the hubris where you know you're like a You know, uh in the case of Andril, you're Boeing or you're one of these huge companies and you're like You know, Parker or Palmer, you know nothing, you know. Just go back to It would be better if they called him Parker. Parker sending it. Uh little Parker. Listen, Parker. They would be like Palmer, you know you know nothing. You know, you're just you go back to making Facebook apps, you know. Uh and like

51:38 probably eight out of ten times that idea is uh right, right? Where like s there's the incumbent and like they fail because it's really hard and there's centuries of of hard work to go against in competition. And so that's the same with you, and I I would have to imagine, where you have these young, really smart people Who have no experience. And Is this the ten percent of the time where you guys are just gonna take over the world, or is this another time where someone's gonna be like, Look, this is exactly what you told you. It does not work.

52:09 That guy, John that that guy who said, Give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age. Here's what I say. Give me a hundred mullets and I'll give you a 10X portfolio. I just need Will, I need Augustus, I need Palmer with a mullet, right? Three mullets. I need ninety seven more mullets and I'll give you a ten X return. Okay, give give me the phone, I'll find I'll find them all for you. You find the mullet.

52:35 Like I can't I don't know enough to know if this is if this is achievable or not. Uh, I definitely understand that feeling. Yeah, for sure. I I'm not qualified to judge the feasibility of something. But I think in general, it's not about And he you know. If nothing if anybody if anybody who's doing a startup like this thinks it's a sure thing or a sure bet You're nuts, right? Like

52:54 You're gonna have to perform a miracle. Right. And That's okay. The the important thing is Oh wow, we took a portion of our brain power. That was otherwise gonna be building X or working at Y company, you know, working at Facebook optimizing, you know, ad clicks.

53:10 Or starting a company that was gonna be doing You know, uh B to B H R what uh software. And instead now we We peeled off a portion of that talent. And now we sent

53:21 You know, a hundred mullets at these problems. And I think that that That's the winning strategy is a hundred or a thousand shots on goal like this, and then the winners will of obviously emerge. Well, I can assure you what we're doing is very real. You wouldn't have a million dollars in our bank and um without it. We wouldn't have done all the things we've done in the last five months if you want to come here to San Francisco and see some real robots in ocean. And the door is always open, Sam. Same for you, Sha. I I I gotta ask you two quick questions. Number one. Seagrass seems so random. And when I if you started this company, you might have thought, Oh, I'll do drones like for warfare.

53:53 Uh how did you arrive at the sea grass thing? Was it instant? Was it was that the initial idea or did you do some discovery to do it? It was the initial idea. It was the initial idea. I came to one of my co founders when he was on a surf trip and he kinda The same ones who went into the cave and designed our AUV went uh heard about Sea Grass and went into cave and like went deep on Sea Grass and came back to us and presented like this is this is a very interesting space and we kinda like He heard about Seagras on a surf trip from who? A Marine Biologist friend of his who was um working on a guy out in the wave. Yeah. Dude, this yeah, this co founder is absolutely carrying your company. Yeah. Built the tech and figured out the go to market. I love it. Yeah, he's the um well, yeah, he he found he found the kind of he was the one who brought Sea Grouse to us, and then myself and my other co-founders kind of put it together and like this is what the business probably should look like. Um but then yeah, we kinda went out. From there into other areas and like you know, like I think any brilliant company finds a local monopoly to build in first. Uh, somewhere where there's nobody else doing stuff with technology, where you've you know, it's a great time and nobody's ever heard of what you're even doing initially. And you can it's a pretty big market. You can

54:58 You'll bring cash into your business as like a lifeblood. And uh so it's been a great place for us to start. It's like the best place for us to start. Nobody's ever heard of it. So I think that's always a good place to to start off on. And then yes, we're gonna use that as a kind of launching point to do other interesting things in the ocean. Who do you admire, Will? Who do you want to be like? Mm. Steve Irwin probably.

55:20 Uh dude, motherfucker. I was gonna say this earlier on, I go, You are Steve Irwin I do, I you got C vibes hardcore, man. Do you got any khaki shorts on right now? Not right. No, but we have a picture of him up on the wall here. Oh I you scream Steve Irwin. You have Steve Irwin vibes through and through. Yeah, yeah. I know he's um

55:40 I'm h hope yeah, I'm hopeful I can I get the the Irwin family uh on the Ulysses train at uh at some point. Um We gotta h we gotta holler at Bindi. Bindy Irwin. That would be great. Robert. I love those guys. Yeah, Robert as well. Um, yeah, you know, look

55:55 Steve I think is like And it's so funny, you know, people say Steve on a podcast in the tech, it's like Steve Jobs. It's like for me, it's Steve Irving. You should have just said Steve at the beginning and then let us fall into your traps. Dude, Sean. Sean, there's this famous video. I I know you've seen this well. There's this famous video of uh it's Steve Irwin and his wife. What's her name? Uh I I forget her name. And anyway, there's a interviewer who asked Steve, like, d you know, you don't seem like you care. Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. Just look, just look. Just look what's on my screen.

56:25 Just look what's on my screen. There it is. Thank you. Just look what I was pulling up because I love that clip. I love this clip. Play it, play it. What good is a fast car, a flash house, and a gold plate of dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I've been put on this planet. to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is gonna help humanity. I want to have the purest oceans, I want to be able to drink water straight out of that creek, I want to stop the ozone layer, I want to save the world. And you know money? Money's great. I can't get enough money and you know what I'm gonna do with it? I'm gonna buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation and guess what Charles, I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate. I'll use it and I'll spend it on buying land. This is how every man should be, by the way. Like you're passionate about something that's good for others and like his wife's just like eyeing him. And uh that's one of my favorite clips of all time.

57:16 Yeah, it's it's it's and so I think the traits in him that I wear are just like raw passion. Just like this like unbridled passion. It's like this like nonsensical passion. It's like You think I'm gonna have a conversation without a microphone? No, I'm gonna put a microphone there. I'm gonna record a podcast. I'm gonna record a podcast every day. And I don't give a rip who's listening. Cause you know what? I'm a podcaster and I'm gonna podcast my ass off. It's a whole lot more lay, but you're not talking about like saving the earth. You know what I mean? I tried. I tried. Like when we're talking about like conversion rate optimization or uh B to B. Dude, in fact, well, we kinda my generation and the generation before me We s we You know, what did they say? Uh

57:56 Uh hard times create or no uh like we need uh hard men to create soft times. That's what I did for you. You know, we went and did the B to B software stuff so you guys could do this fun, amazing stuff. So really, you're welcome. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Can we do just a quick happy hour of two topics that you had on this list that I you know, Sam, if you got a run or whatever, you feel feel free, but I just gotta ask you about these. So I wanna do the fun one and then the spiritual one. The fun one is conspiracy theories. You're a big Conspiracy You're a fan of conspiracy theories, I believe. And you like

58:27 People Who like conspiracy theories. So can you just give me a rant? on why conspiracy theories are underrated here? I think um well I think it it's like uh you know a lot of the traits of like a conspiracy theorist are like those of like uh like a great like uh founder. I think like someone that like believes in something that everyone else tells them is like not real um or like you know that they shouldn't believe in Or like, you know, people that are like able to see patterns that others can't see. And you know, they they just like go down these like rabbit holes. Uh, and uh I think like just like this contrarian spirit, I think it's like very, very good. And I think it's just like a very important, you know, the default is like doing things that other people do. And so I think it's very important to cultivate uh an ability to see the world. Different, I think. Description and conspiracy theorist.

59:15 It's like this like negative description, you know what I mean? It's the same thing. I just think it's very important to t uh, you know, uh how a weird idea is to take them seriously, right? Like if we just had heard the seagrass idea and just like rubbish it, you know, we wouldn't I would like I don't know what the hell I'd be doing today. You know, it's like you need to take something weird and go with it. And so like I don't believe like to blindly believe every report of telepathy and nonverbal autistic children, every like late night UFO sighting, but like I refuse to dismiss them outright. And I think You know, history shows us that breakthroughs often happen at the edges, where people are curious enough or foolhardy enough to investigate the unexplainable. So it's like whether it's like Christian mystics, you know, who swear by miraculous healings. Or physics experiments that like challenge our understanding of space time. I think it's very important to like lean into these weird things and ask, um, what if? And yeah, I think conspiracy theories are just kind of like fun as well. They're like kind of like horoscopes for dudes. So they're like if any if not if nothing else, like they're just like it's like uh it's just like a fun thing to kinda like spend your your your time uh reading about. On here you talk about aliens. We were with Joe Gebia, uh recently, who's like the ninetieth richest person in the world. And I was like, Joe, look

1:00:22 You're worth like ten billion dollars. Like if there's Illuminati, like you are either in it or you're friends with the people in it. Tell me one thing that Like you guys talk about and he looked at me, he goes Aliens are real. And he went on a he went on a big uh he had a big diatribe on his passion for like uh you know UFOs and aliens and how he absolutely uh is on board with them.

1:00:43 Is on board with them? He came off very passionately like It is absolutely a thing. And the funny thing is if you meet Joe He's he's a serious. Joe doesn't just say wild shit for wild shit's sake, you know. Joe's not like, Oh, he's a kooky billionaire. No.

1:01:00 Joe is like an extremely principled artist. He is a uh a very serious. And so for him to say something like that, it's not like you you don't discount it with the same discount rate you would if uh John McAfee was the guy saying it. You know what I mean? If if you' if if your readers want the name of this Robert all the best. Right, website I recommend going is a website a friend of mine runs UAP evidence dot com. Is there any other dope conspiracy uh

1:01:25 Then I should go look at you in a rabbit hole that would waste a nice five hours of my time? Lines of a conspiracy more like wacky, weird, rabbit hole you need to go down. Is you need to listen to the telepathy tapes podcast. Um I have and I love that. What's uh what what is this? Is this like I can read your mind? So basically there's this group of people that people have been calling crazy for like the last like two decades, right? It's basically the teachers and parents of children with nonverbal autism because they've been convinced that their kids have been able to like read their mind. And now for like the first time with teaching kids how to spell on like iPads and also with like getting

1:02:03 researchers in to study them, they're actually verifying these telepathic capabilities, right? So like a mother will like go into one room and she'll be shown like a random number generator and her son, Akeel in the other room will hit the exact same three numbers one hundred percent of the time consistently in tests. That's awesome. Yes. It's like the serial podcast. But it's this woman investigating these claims. And she's like You know, like an a a NPR skeptical, let me call it. Right. So she she comes in, she's like this.

1:02:33 Didn't make a ton of sense, but I'm open minded. As you turned. I I didn't finish the whole thing. I I listened probably the first two or three, but I was listening to while I was going to sleep and I just had some like wild, wild nights there. So I decided all right. I need to only listen to this, you know, not falling asleep if I'm gonna do this right. But by the way, Will, did you walk away from that? You you know, half convinced, three fourths convinced, totally convinced. What did you walk away from? I was going into it already with some sort of like priors that I thought that like consciousness consciousness isn't local to the brain. Like we like to think that like our brain is this kind of like DVD player, um, where like consciousness is playing and it's like Being played to us, and that's how we experience things. I think we're more like I always kind of thought, and for different reasons, that we're more like a radio antenna. You know, you have these stories of people like their son dies in an accident and they just know something's wrong, right? They just like know, right? Like there's like the you know, everyone, every family has these stories of like death or like something bad happened, and they just like knew they woke up in the middle of the night.

1:03:23 And they're like, I couldn't sleep then after that and then they wake up the next day, they hear about the software accident or something like that. Or you have like There's like knowingness and these other things, like just like telepathy twins. telepathy and stuff like and there's like this world of parapsychology, which is like the study of these kind of side phenomena. There's like a few very reproducible experiments in it, like the Gansfeld experiment, which if you allow me to go on this like very short rabbit hole, but like the most reproducible experiment in this field is basically you take two people, you put them in like two separate rooms These could be twins, these could be husband, wife, they could be two artists, they could be two people who don't know each other, different settings. And basically you give me a picture and you give uh and you're the receiver then in another room. And I'm in one room and I'm talking about this random picture I've been given. Let's say it's one in four different pictures. I get a picture of an elephant. For five minutes I talk about elephants. I saturate my brain with Africa and wild animals and savannah.

1:04:13 You're in the other room, you're listening to white noise, and you're talking uh basically about what you're sensing, feeling that they could be about. And then at the end of the five minutes. I've I stop and you get replayed what you were saying to yourself for five minutes and you get the four random images and you get to pick one of the four. And then you would assume if Complete chance, you know, you would twenty five percent chance of getting it right. But pretty consistently you get like thirty percent or above in this like experiment. And then when there's like twins, husband and wives and or artists they actually score like more consistently, thirty-five, in some instances, like seventy percent in some of these experiments. And so I've always kind of been like prime to think that like actually maybe we're more like We're touching into something and like that explains a lot of the spiritual and woo-woo stuff. And then I he see this and it's like very good experimental evidence and really well done. And I'm like, Okay, nah, that's one time legit. Like our brain is not like this like AI chip that like runs and just like tells us what to do. It's like an AI chip, but it's like

1:05:09 It also has a radio antenna that can connect to other people, can maybe connect to God, spirits, other things. We don't really know. Dude I'm so bombed that I grew up in the B to B uh era of startups Yeah, so bombed. Well, I wish we like I wish I was ten years younger, you were ten year I wish we could have hung out. Dude, let's grab some beers.

1:05:30 I went to a bachelor party this weekend and Everybody on uh the gr it was a b it was a bachelor party where the bachelor's and the bachelorettes were Both at Doing it together, basically, as a as a party together. And the bachelorette side was so cool. Like

1:05:45 Every single one of them. Just You know those tattoos that aren't like filled in, they're just like It almost looks like a pencil sketch. Just seven or eight of those.

1:05:54 Some piercings. Sense of style, off the charts, knowledge of beer and music way. beyond my recognition. You know Sexuality was a total spectrum. You never knew who was who's dating who. Anybody could be dating anybody in the room was insane. I just felt like.

1:06:10 I literally felt like I came from a c I was a caveman and I was like Or like you know, like I I was the gingerbread man, actually. I wasn't even a real human being. I was a cookie cutter shape that was placed in this room. That's awesome. That is so funny. I think one like universal law about technology is that like it breeds variants, right? Like it just like it it creates like skewed outcomes. And I think you probably like see this in like younger generations as well. Like you've got like weird like kind of like schizo people like me that will like burn your ear off by like conspiracy theories and like you know go down like these weird rabbites. But like I think you also it's like on the like maybe on the more negative and that could send you like down like some pretty dark places that maybe you wouldn't be a productive member of society if you go down like those like into those like very dark corners of the internet. Um, or similarly, like it's you know, you have people who are like doing like great things, but then you also like

1:06:58 Yeah, I think there is like a very interesting question that's posed in technology right now. It's like you know where are the um you know the the kind of like less than kind of twenty five um you know uh you know billion dollar uh company founders. This is like an interesting question that I think is it's still not really like there's no satisfying answers around like previous generations had like the Collinsons pretty early. Um, you know, we had like Alexander Wang, like he's maybe like a few years older than me, pretty early. Still doesn't seem clear why there isn't one in this generation. Maybe we have to wait another year or two for companies like US Caesar or Rainmaker or others to like to to to get there, but There is definitely like a I think a bigger skew in But the ideas that young people are interested in today, I think that's like broadly just like downstream of um yeah technology. Are you gonna become an American?

1:07:40 Uh yeah, I think I'm gonna get I'm on the green card path, yeah. M my last question was the spiritual one. You said you lived with Buddhist monks in Nepal. And for a summer. He learned a lot. And one thing I liked, you said I couldn't come around to their view, which states that zero desires leads to enlightenment.

1:07:57 Um And so you and then you said like, you know, I you wanted to be You wanted to be action oriented and do something with your life rather than sit and sort of renounce everything. Uh and then you said something like I came to c I came to explain my five desires or six desires. Can you just expl give it give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at

1:08:16 So yeah, I just Um kinda w I just had heard that that you you could do this, right? You can actually just like find a monastery to like basically put you up if you teach them English. So I I did that. Find a monastery in Nepal that would like put me up. It's but pretty rural, a few hours outside and the uh Kamandu. Went there, flew there. Taught them Engl I told myself teaching English before I came over was teaching them English. And then like in the downtime was like able to speak to some of the older monks who had like good English and like ask them about their ideology'cause there's just a there's just five monks with like a thick Irish accent speaking English out there. They're like, Yeah, I learned from an expert. Wild actual segue.

1:08:53 I was out running in the middle of Nepal one day. And I bumped into a dude who was wearing a Galway Bay five K T shirt and I was like Isaac, you might have like no English, but I was like Where did you get this like T shirt? Like this is like we're near where I'm from. And he was like He's like had like kinda like an Irish accent. He's like, Oh well, you know, I actually work with an Irish guy. Um, he has like an orphanage and like a charity out here. And I was like, Oh wait, like

1:09:19 What's this like Irish guy's name? H the Irish guy he named was like the one Irish guy that my m my neighbour who's like my mum's friend. My mum's friend was like my mum was worried about me going to Nepal. She's like, Well, you know, I k you need to have a contact in Nepal when you go over there, you know, I was like, and it's in my neighbor new guy who's in Nepal, who had a charity out there. Anyway, like this random guy I met in this like tiny village worked with him. So this is like you know, there's like art people everywhere and I'm gonna go. Everyone just talking like kind like all these monks are like I boxed the bullocks off them. Yeah. You'll do nothing. Literally. Is that what the mugs are are saying? We didn't here to come we didn't come to take part. We came to take over. And you're uh yeah, I'm I'm curious about their religion, I'm asking questions about it. But one thing I just couldn't get over was like, you know, they

1:10:13 Don't believe in desire. Like they believe desire is like what leads to suffering. If you desire for something, then you're creating a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you have that thing. And I'm just like, Dude, I'm very like American dream pilled. I'm like, you know, I should want for things, I should want for things. But I can see how that can go wrong as well, right?'Cause that leads to like you know, keeping up with the Joneses type lifestyle, um, or maybe like, you know, kinda like the you know, the faddies on and on the chair at Walmart kinda like thing, you know, like that that's like probably like when it goes like uh maybe like too far. Hey, you better watch it, Will. So anyway, so that's where I I can see where I can go wrong, right? But I do think there was like an essence of truth in there where it's like maybe you should like actually try to trim down things as little as possible. And I have this like bizarre experience where I was I was I went and did Ever Space Camp afterwards and I was thinking a lot about like the things that they were saying to me. And again, I feel like I had like a download, like one of these experiences where like something just came into my brain that I don't think it I well hadn't been thinking about it before. And I genuinely think it was a download from

1:11:20 you know, something spiritual that like gave me like some guidance on how I k I was literally it sounds crazy, but I was sitting on a rock Um like just like on a break in the hike, this like ten day hike up to a base camp and Uh I look it was like Thinking through it's like if you have no desire, like how what do you do? It's like, Oh, maybe you should have desire, but the minimum amount of them. Then I was like, What is like important to me? And I was like on my hand, I was like, Oh, my family, my friends, my health, my wealth, my craft. And I was like, Oh shit. Like that's like five things. That's like nice and clean. And then I like have this like idea at the same time of like a rose bush.

1:11:52 Like rose bushes if you like leave them go uncapped. they basically just grow like briars and they go thorns and the flowers don't really grow. You have to like cut them back to let the energy go back to like the rose. And I was just like I had this like very clear vision of like roses and I was like Oh, okay, right. So this is it. Okay. So whenever I'm like down over something, it's like if it's not one of these like five important things to me. Then it's like Okay, just like let it go. Like stop.

1:12:18 desiring for it. Um and I found that to be helpful. You had a girlfriend? Uh no. That was your reaction to his story about the Buddhist monks and like realizing that the meaning of life You tell me an Irish guy.

1:12:34 With that in a center profile, is it just gonna destroy the whole city? Give me a break. Saving the world, uh saving the world seagrass. Former monk. Sam's five desires. Family, health, wealth, fitness, and will be those are Sam's five desires. This is so good, man. You're the best. Will this is awesome. People should check you out where on Twitter you're Will O'Brien. What's your what's your hand? At Will O'Brien. W I L O B R I.

1:13:06 Okay. Great. And uh good luck with the company, man. Thank you, dude. Alright, that's it. That's the pod, thank you. I want to I put my law in it like a day song on the road

1:13:20 Travel never looking back

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