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

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 smart in like 45 minutes. Your mind gets blown like 5 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 how the ocean is the new space, 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. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel. Never—

All right, what's up? We got our friend Will O'Brien here, and Will is an Irish guy who 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 the ocean is the new space and how there's companies like SpaceX and others that have built huge $100 billion+ companies about exploring space, about putting satellites in space, about reusable rockets, and that there's an opportunity for a similar wave of, of disruption for startups in the ocean. And I love that idea. I honestly, I'm never going to do it. So I'll just put that up front. I'm never going to 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 kind of love the theory and the intellectual 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 going to be right up your alley. So that's my interest in it. Sam, I'm curious 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 one-liner or the icebreaker was what's something you're deathly afraid of? To me it's being in the ocean to where I can't see land. So like, I'm not even going to be out there, but yeah, I agree with your premise.

And Will, 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 building startups that are focused on the ocean?

Sean, you just wound him up really easily.

This is going to be one of the, this is going to be one of those podcasts that we've had.

Uh, we've only had maybe 5 of them ever where at the end of the hour we are like, we're no longer podcasting. We're getting into the ocean business.

Yeah. Like, aye aye, let's go. Sam, he just said a bunch of stats. So which of those surprised you? So I'm just going to rattle a couple back. He said, all right, this one probably doesn't surprise you. 70% of the Earth is covered in water. I think only 25% has ever been explored. He said a billion people rely on, uh, the ocean for the primary source of income. 3 billion as their diet. Explain that. What's the diet and the jobs one of the income one?

Oh, it's just like people, like, you know, most of them— I mean, the human societies generally settle along coastlines. Like, this is like a very common trend.

Yeah, but I'm in New York, but I don't eat fish every day.

Yeah, but in developed countries, it's not as, you know, we've developed logistics, which means you can 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, developed countries. So yeah, most humans just live along a coastline naturally, then easiest 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 you're talking about fisheries, shipping, is it like defense? Like, what is that? Are those the big three, or am I missing something big and obvious?

The, the framing for me, how I think about like the ocean economy, is like you generally kind of break it up into like three categories, right? Like you have like the biosphere, which is your fisheries, it's your ecosystem restoration, it's your environmental mapping, it's science in the ocean, it's all around biosphere management. Then you have the prosperity-oriented part around it, this is the commercial, this is your energies, your infrastructures, your oil and gas, it's your data infrastructure, these sorts of things, it's your logistics, shipping. And then you have keeping the seas safe, which is defence and security, border security, critical infrastructure protection, deploying ships in the South China Sea, these sorts of things.

Give me an example of a startup today that's doing really well that's based on this kind of ocean economy that you're talking about.

Yeah, I think one player that's interesting in the unmanned systems space that's been around for a long time, I think over a decade now, and was really kind of one of the first players to start doing interesting new things in the ocean is Saildrone.

What problem are they solving? What does Saildrone do?

I suppose they are solving the kind of data gathering at scale in the ocean problem. They build these autonomous sailboats, these huge vessels.

They look amazing. They look awesome.

They build these huge vessels, these massive sailboats that can basically stay at sea for many, many months at a time. You can put a load of fancy sensors on them that can take data from the water, that can gather video footage at the surface and these sorts of things. And then relay them back to someone in the United States. It might be a government agency like NOAA who want to know how much fish is in the seas off Alaska. They could sell it to the US Navy to know how deep is the waters in and around Guam or something like that. And then they sell these things as a service. But they're a very interesting founder there. Seems like a super sharp guy who's been obsessed with sailing for decades. Again, a lot of these ocean founders that you see, they're 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 business do, Will? What's Ulysses? Ulysses or Ulysses?

How do you say it? Yeah, yeah, Ulysses. At Ulysses, we're building a general-purpose autonomy platform for maritime operations.

Say that like we're stupid.

Just pretend, pretend that we're stupid.

Yeah, yeah. I know it's hard to believe, Just go ahead and dumb that down for me.

Autonomous robots for the ocean to do, to do important things.

Okay. And what's one important thing that you would do? You would, uh, like for example, you would go to a pipe in the ocean and determine if it's got a hole in it?

7% a year of this thing is going away. Okay.

And why is it dying? Is it 'cause pollution or what's the cause?

There's a few things. I mean, water quality is like a very common, you know, cause for loss. Other things are just like construction, construction around coastlines, digging it up, dredging, changing ocean temperatures, changing ocean currents, these sorts of things impact it. And basically, the kind of context there is there's a lot of governments in and around all over the world really, really panicking around this. If they lose their seagrasses, they lose their fish stocks. If they lose their fish stocks, you have the 1 billion people who rely on it and 3 billion people who rely on it for food and the ability to pay for income. And they're in a tough situation. And basically restoring it, i.e., bringing it back, is currently a very manual process.

And how are you guys doing that?

We built 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 track them.

Why would someone pay you to do this?

Sam, I put, uh, how important is seagrass into ChatGPT. Here's what I said. Seagrass is wildly important to the world. And then it basically says it captures carbon 35 times faster than rainforest, which I think you said. And then it says, it's like a baby crib for the ocean. The seagrass basically is where 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, uh, entire, it says 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 kind of skipped the headline, Sean. Did we— he, he built a robotics business that in the first year you've only— I think, I think you said you only raised $2 million or something like that. So with only $2 million in funding in your first 18 months of business, you did $1 million in revenue. Is that right?

Yeah. And just 5 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 whatever, you know, it's like when the Raspberry Pi came out, then it's like, oh, we can now have this little computer for $35 or whatever. Uh, is there something that does, that's made it a lot cheaper or maybe just there's more talent? What's changed?

3D 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 metal, sheet metal, CAD, 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, the motors went down massively in cost. For us as well, a critical enabler of what we do is Starlink, because the way our system works is we have this autonomous boat, it's a surface vehicle. This is our mothership, and then we have a docking system that releases 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. Um, so you have like other like kind of one-off, uh, features like that.

And that company you were talking about, Saildrone, they've raised like over $100 million. It looks like they're valued $500 to $1 billion. That's, that's interesting. There's another one called Saroniq. Sam, do you know Saroniq?

No. How do you spell it?

S-A-R-O-N-I-C. And Will, you probably know a little bit more about this company than me. I think this Joe Lonsdale seeded this company, right?

Yes.

Yeah. God, 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, we're building drone, like drones for the water and, you know, drones in the, for defense, just like Anduril's doing it for the sky. And, and, you know, modern warfare has turned into drone-based. 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?

Oh, I don't know. 500? What? It's hard to even say. 100?

So, okay, so you're a lot closer than I thought. I would have guessed that we have thousands of ships. We have 300 ships in the Navy.

Is a ship considered like an aircraft carrier? Because those are huge, right? Those are like cities.

Sure. But oh my God. But only 300. That's just like a very small number to me. And we have 67 submarines.

That's it?

Yeah, like they're building, um, I think of it like they're building the Humvees and we're building the Toyota Hiluxes, right? Like they're building like these like ultra-fast, like defense-focused, like vehicles. 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 ocean and keep Taiwan safe if they keep going on the path they're doing. And they're doing an incredible job at that. And then we occupy a different niche. We're like, we just want every single day-to-day task that is done at sea, we want it done on our platform. And so we want all the servicing done by Ulysses platforms and these sorts of things. There's a lot of things that are making the ocean very important in this century more than previous ones. Warfare is a good example. Every other single war we've fought in the last 3 decades until now has been in a desert. Now we're going to the ocean. That requires a complete retooling of the military. And just even how we think about warfare fundamentally needs to change. The climate question is ultimately an ocean question. The ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink. It is where most of the life on Earth lives. It is one of our biggest sources of food in a world where a population is growing and Food scarcity is always a question. Even just like you look at AI, right? Like the data infrastructure buildout for AI is going to be like enormous, right? And basically that's going to 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 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 go back. So there's there's already pipes under the ocean that basically, like, internet pipes under the ocean, correct?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, most of the, most of the, the information that tries our internet connection now is most of that is like traveling through, is traveling underground.

And who built that? Is that the government built that or Google built that? Who put that, who put those pipes in the ocean to do that?

So a lot of the initial infrastructure buildout for, for, for IT in the ocean came from telecoms companies actually.

Yeah, like in the '80s, Sean, 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 $100 million in revenue in a year. That was what they—

Did they die or what happened?

A lot of them are still running. And then there was some of the, you know, if you look at like what are the biggest frauds on earth, 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 ocean. But a lot of them are still around. They're just like small B2B— they're not small, but they're B2B companies that you wouldn't even know, but they can be like a $10 billion a year company. But in the '80s, right, Will, maybe— I don't know if you know this, but in the '80s, that was like the birth of a lot of this, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Massively. And now you're seeing a transition to the buildout being coming from FAANG, from like big tech. And soon I think it'll be like the AI companies.

So what you're saying, Will, now is that AI companies need these data centers, just, you know, huge amounts of GPUs in a data center. And those data centers need cooling, they need power, they need tons of things, and they need— ideally, they need to be close to places where people are using it. And what you're saying is that somebody's going to build a data center in the ocean, or people are already building data centers in the ocean. And what, who's doing that? 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 YC startup as well run by friends of mine, Sam Mendel. He's got a company called Network Ocean. They're building and operating, starting to building and operate these things.

Are they actually underwater or are they on top of the water, just out in the ocean?

The plan is for it to be subsea. 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. I think the biggest opportunity in this, like, you know, paradigm in the future where more and more data cables are being laid subsea is actually in the protection of them. Right? So I don't know if you guys are familiar what's going on in like the Baltic Sea and places, but like I think in the last year about 11 cables have been cut by foreign actors. And like, you know, basically the kind of—

and these cables, by the way, they're like, uh, it's like a human-sized tunnel, right?

Are they on the ocean floor or are they like floating in the ocean?

Like to say cable, we're not talking like, uh, 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 that 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 world order. They're not even, they're not even fucking hiding this. Like, they're cutting the cables. They're like, 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 are 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 2 days later, oh, cable cut.

I wonder— dude, calling, calling this a cable cutter is like calling a rowboat 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 thinking like a clip It's not scissors. Yeah, this is insane.

So they're going down and they're cutting this. And what does that do? Like, does a country lose internet or is it just like— I mean, damage it?

Okay, 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 hot war breaks out in like the South China Sea, right? First target then is going to be like a military base in like the Pacific, somewhere like Guam, right? One, if you, if you want to like completely scramble what, you know, their understanding of and situational awareness of what is going on. You are going to 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 going to be like scrambling their airwaves with like, you know, electromagnetic interference. And that's how you're going to like just completely prevent like American military responses in the Pacific, right?

But how many— how many cables? Like, we're— you're talking to two dummies How many cables does America rely on?

I'm so impressed that you knew that number. That's insane to me. So there's not a lot of redundancy, you're saying?

No, no, not at all. Like, they're, they're very difficult to lay, right? And 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 way better off defending them with unmanned water drones than trying to lay backup pipes down there and leave them undefended.

How deep do your vehicles go? Do they go to the bottom of the ocean where these pipes are?

So for the Baltic Sea, I mean, it's one of the shallower seas, and this is the major kind of area of activity where this is going right now. So our vehicle works in that sea at all depth profiles in sea. So for the Baltic Sea part of it, it works. When you get into like gnarlier 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 starts getting difficult. But like, yeah, we will be adding future vehicles to the fleet that can do that.

How old are you, Will?

I'm 27.

Sean, so when you and I moved to San Francisco in, well, I moved there in '12 and we're about the same age, it was the sharing economy. That was the thing. So it was Airbnb, Airbnb and Uber and Lyft were the winners. And then there was a bunch of derivative things like Airbnb for garages or, you know, or for storage. A few years later, it was AI or crypto. So like Bitcoin and Coinbase were winners. And there was a bunch of like silly things. Uh, right now, 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 10 years ago, I would have told you, like, you know, that was when Boom Supersonic was starting and a few other things. I would have said, this is foolish. What are you guys doing? 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.

For me, it's like a no-brainer. I mean, like, you know, the low-hanging fruit of software has been eaten, right? You guys, like, you know, it's like, yeah, we ate it.

Like how many more CRMs are there?

It's like, yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. And I think it's so fascinating because 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're wearing cowboy boots and you got a little bit of swag to you. And you like, if you were to, if you were to talk about what you're talking about, it would be like, you're, you're so out of touch. You're out of touch. For the, for the, for the YC group of out-of-touch people. Like, it's just so interesting to me and I think it's great.

So there's a— I did a podcast with James Krieger and he has this thing about technology windows. Sam, did you ever see this part?

No.

It's so funny, Sean, uh, and to meet Will, who's like in the thick of it, actually what you're describing.

Yeah. Will, when did you start? Were you 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 said, I've been in the ocean, on the ocean, near the ocean since I was a kid, diving, surfing, whatever, wakeboarding, all these sorts of things growing up, but never had built in it really before this kind of scooter sharing startup thing popped off. I was working in that. My co-founders all kind of had been tinkering in 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 because none of us came in with these preconceived notions for how subsea drones should work. Two of my co-founders were building aerial drones in a drone delivery startup before, so they took a lot of the primitives from that. One of them had worked on self-driving cars, took some of the ideas from that. But again, I think there's definitely this idea that I agree with that to really actually shake up an industry, it's probably good if you don't come from because we came to it and we thought initially that we were going to 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, they were like, one of the ones we were looking at, which actually had the specs that would've met what we wanted to do, cost like $500 grand. That's like a quarter of our pre-seed to do what we want. And then our CTO, Jamie, he just went into a cave cave for a few days and just came back with a design for a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle. And then we tested and we were like, "Oh shit, this works. Oh shit, it's like 10, 20 times cheaper than anything we could have bought." So it's like sometimes you just need a new idea and an artist to go into a cave and then you can change things.

That's how 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 they come back with like this like secret, and then, you know, someone else spreads the word for them, right? Like it's like, yeah, St. Peter does it in like the Catholic Church. And like, well, there's— so yes, this is a common archetype that, um, 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 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 friend's got a very, very interesting startup called Wildtype, which is like sustainable sushi-grade salmon. So basically that's like cultivated seafood. Um, so their first product, like they're—

what is— what do you mean by cultivated?

It's grown, it's grown. It's not like farmed in or caught at sea.

Like grown in a lab or grown—

yeah, like in a—

yeah, exactly, in this like industrial, um, process.

Yeah, they can basically grow cells and then put them together in such a way that it tastes like sashimi-grade salmon. So, in the same way that Elon started off with a sports car, they're starting off with your 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 brewery.

Yes, exactly. It's similar, I guess. I mean, look, breweries are where so much of the best biotech innovation has come from people building mass industrial processes for cultivating food for 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?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I got it through my friend. I don't know if they're in stores yet. They're still undergoing FDA approval. But like, yeah, none of these nasty heavy metals or microplastics in them. You know, it's reducing pressure on fish stocks. You know, this is good stuff. It doesn't have any of the nasty like parasites that you get in some of this like farmed salmon as well. So yeah, definitely I think things like this will be important.

Holy shit. This is crazy to me.

This is crazy.

Is it like the lab-grown meats where it's like $10,000 an ounce? It's like 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 you have the real thing, but it's super expensive and so nobody can afford it.

Well, I think given that, like, my friend shared it with me that it's not that expensive, but it's You're not that good of friends.

No, no, exactly. Yeah. Are you?

But I think this stuff is like sooner than we think. It's around the corner.

Wow. These guys did $100 million series B in 2022.

That's pretty crazy.

What, what else is cool? Tell, tell Will, tell me everything. What the guys like you are into, like, uh, some more ocean shit.

Some crazy ones.

Yeah. Okay. All right. This one is, is wild, right? Buckle up. Okay. Ocean treasure hunting. Right? So there is actually like, you know, hundreds of wrecks out there in the ocean today 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, the source governments, so like the Spaniards, the Portuguese, still have claim on these things. However, there is precedent in history for you to do 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? So you can do this, right?

It's, it's like these models where it's like these, uh, SaaS negotiation companies were like, hey, if we go and save you money on your vendors, we keep 20%. It's that, except for you go to the Spanish royal government and you're like, hey, there are If we find any hidden treasures in the ocean, can we keep a couple bars for ourselves?

Exactly.

Ram for piracy. Who's building this?

So my friend used to do this. His name's Chip Forsyth, 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, you know, he went off the coast and just what, scuba dive? 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 is it's kind of 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 coast, 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. There's like, there's like, you know, the pre-mission, uh, you Negotiating, looking through historical records to see where we think it could be, scoping it out and also getting permission so that when you do the recovery, you have some chance of being able to hold onto it. Then there's this kind of scouting where you're actually on site and you're doing scouting and you're basically using sonar to scan the seabed and understand what's there. And then there's recovery where you're bringing out these gnarly JCB-style ROVs and remote operated vehicles that go down and just like dig it all up and bring it back up, and then you have your party.

And is anybody doing this? Like, has anybody— do you know someone who's like made like $10 million finding treasures in the ocean?

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 you, did you say there's 3 million shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean?

So I'm not sure specifically on a total amount of shipwrecks. I wouldn't be surprised if there's that many shipwrecks, but there's hundreds that potentially have billions on them. Wow.

Okay, that's insane. What else?

Have you seen, Sean, have you seen this guy Augustus, the founder of Rainmaker?

Incredible mullet.

Yeah, dude. So there's this whole cohort of people of which Will appears to be one of the, like, you know, class presidents. Where there's this like, they're very strange. They don't fit this stereotype. When you think of a tech entrepreneur, they're like kind of manly men or they're 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 to be billionaires or if you're gonna go broke, but it's only gonna be one of the two. 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. Will, maybe you can like put words to it, but there's this new like breed that, that Austin and San Francisco had a baby.

You get the, the stache and the mullet of Austin, and then you get the insane ambition and tech, tech chops of Silicon Valley. And that's what's happening.

For example, this guy, uh, uh, Augustus, I think his name is, he had, he's on the COVID I think, Forbes or something, and he's sitting on a bench press, like working out. That is not something that Brian Chesky or Travis Kalanick would have done in 2012.

I think it's emblematic of the evolution of the technology industry though. I think we began as this kind of hippies that found computers with people like Steve Jobs. We were actualizing on the axis of the spiritual realm. And then it was like, you had people like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg who were just nerds, like actualizing on the sense of mind. They were smart and nerdy. And now you have people who are openly flexing on, like, we're actualizing on the sense of the body, right? We're becoming strong. And you have this full integration of mind, body, and spirit. And it's no wonder that this tech becoming fully actualized on all of the axes that a human needs to develop on is happening at the exact same time where you have Elon who is like chief tech bro in the fucking White House, right? Like, these things, this is like no coincidence to me. It's like tech has 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 like spiritually like aligned. It's like mentally, you know, we're smart and like we're like now like a strong group of people as well who are taking health and fitness seriously. And it's like, yeah, so this is why I think like we're at like the most interesting time in technology right now.

I like that. Poetic. You know, last night I watched a clip of the final scene of Ratatouille. You seen that, Sam? No. It's a great movie. And the final scene of Ratatouille is the critic, the critic who is the most fearsome critic in all of the town, writes the review about the restaurant where the rat has been cooking. And he just gives this beautiful monologue. Maybe the— maybe the most beautiful 4 minutes in all of film is the last 4 minutes of Ratatouille here, the monologue. Will, I think you're up there with the last 4 minutes of Ratatouille there with your mind, body, and spirit analogy for tech. 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, you know, the bicycle for the mind. So you had Steve Jobs talking about how the— how computers will enable creativity. Body. 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 and 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, you know, the, the entrepreneurial will has, uh, has grown in that way.

Look at Bezos and Zuckerberg, they're getting jacked, like they're doing TRT. They look like, look like this is like, uh, I think it's true, dramatic the spirit is in technology now. It's like you have the, one of my favorite podcasts besides yours, The Tech Bros, and what Jordy and John are doing there. It's like they're the technology brothers. They're leaning into the fact that they're tech bros. That used to be a slur. Now it's like, oh, I'm confident in it. I'm owning it. And they're doing these hilarious promo videos of them sipping Dom Pérignon. There's a confidence and an air of like, okay, let's do it now. You know, we're not like, we're not going to be like at like the events and functions anymore kind of lying about—

you're not neutered, dude. Listen to this.

I got an email from this guy named Jamie at the Wall Street Journal. So Jamie, uh, is a reporter for Wall Street Journal's style team, and he— listen to this— he goes, I'm writing a story about tech guys embracing Western wear, so basically cowboy clothes, in the past recent years. And I want to write about how the tech bro uniform has changed from quarter zips and Allbirds to denim shirts, cowboy boots. And like when I saw this and he said tech bro, I was like, dude, that's amazing.

I think—

I don't think I could talk like this is not going to be—

life win that he thinks you're the expert to go to, right?

Yeah. Life win. But I was like, I'm not exactly a tech, but that's amazing that you think that I like like, I am a fashion influencer officially now.

Yeah. Uh, reply: mission accomplished. Yeah, dude, that's amazing. And you're right, like, dude, is there any difference— you know, the first time you saw Zuck doing MMA, 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 like robot dog getting kicked and like jumping around and like doing backflips and shit? Like, there's no difference between the two videos. That's the same video.

It's one of those days that everyone remembers where they were when they saw It's like, 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 lot of last questions. Um, can I invest? Yeah, yeah, great. Okay, cool, because I think this is awesome. I, uh, 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 goes both ways. So on one hand, there's the hubris where, you know, you're like a, you know, in the case of Andruil, 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.

More condescending. Little Parker.

Listen, Parker.

They would be like, Palmer, you know, you know nothing. You know, you're just— go back to making Facebook apps, you know. And like, like probably 8 out of 10 times that idea is, uh, right, right? Where like there's an 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 would have to imagine where you have these young, really smart people who have no experience. And is this the 10% of the time where you guys are just going to take over the world or is this another time where someone's going to be like, look, this is exactly what you told, it does not work.

All right, listen, 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 100 mullets and I'll give you a 10x portfolio. I just need Will, I need Augustus, I need Palmer with a mullet, right? 3 mullets. I need 97 more mullets and I'll give you a 10x return. Okay, give, give me the fund, I'll find, I'll find the mullets for You find the mullets.

Like, I can't, I don't know enough to know if this is, if this is achievable or not.

Oh, I definitely understand that feeling. Yeah, for sure. I am not qualified to judge the feasibility of something, but I think in general it's not about any, 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, you're going to have to perform a miracle, right? And that's okay. The important thing is, oh wow, we took a portion of our brainpower that was otherwise going to be building X or working at Y company, you know, working at Facebook optimizing, you know, ad clicks, or starting a company that was going to be doing, you know, uh, B2B HR, whatever software. And instead, now we, we peeled off a portion of that talent, and now we sent, you know, 100 mullets at these problems. And I think that, that, that's the winning strategy, is 100 or 1,000 shots on goal like this, and then the winners will obviously emerge.

Well, I can assure you what we're doing is very real. You wouldn't have a million dollars in our bank account, um, without it. We wouldn't have done all the things we've done in the last 5 months. If you want to come here to San Francisco and see some real robots in Ocean, the door is always open, Sam. Same for you, Sean.

I, I got to 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. Uh, how did you arrive at the seagrass thing? Was it instant? Was it— was that the initial idea, or did you do some discovery to figure that out?

The initial idea, it was the initial idea. I came to one of my co-founders, he he was on a surf trip and he kind of— the same ones who went into the cave and designed our AUV— went, uh, heard about seagrass and went into a cave and like went deep on seagrass and came back to us and presented like, this is, this is a very interesting space. And we kind of—

he heard about seagrass on a surf trip from who?

A marine biologist friend of his who was, um, working on a guy out, a guy out in the wave.

Yeah, dude, this guy. Yeah, this co-founder is absolutely carrying your company. Yeah, he's got— you've built the tech and figured out the go-to-market.

Who do you admire, Will? Who do you want to be like?

Steve Irwin, probably.

Dude, motherfucker. I was gonna say this earlier on. I go, you are Steve Irwin. I do. I, you got Steve vibes hardcore, man. You got any khaki shorts on right now?

Not right now, 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, yeah, I'm hopeful I can get the, the Irwin family, uh, on the Ulysses train at some point.

Um, we gotta holler at Bindi. Bindi Irwin.

That would be great.

Robert Irwin. I love those guys.

Yeah. Robert as well. Um, yeah, you know, look, 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 like Steve Irwin.

You should have just said Steve at the beginning and then let us fall into your trap.

Dude, Sean, Sean, there's this famous video. I know you've seen this, Will. There's this famous video of, uh, it's Steve Irwin and his wife. What's her name? Uh, I forget her name. And anyway, there's an interviewer who asked Steve, like, you know, you don't seem like you care.

Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, just look, just look, just look what's on my screen. Just look what's on my screen.

There it is.

Thank you.

I was pulling it up because I love that clip with you, brother. I love this.

I love this clip. Play it, play it.

What good is a fast car, flash house, and a gold-plated 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 going to help humanity. I want to have the purest oceans. I 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 going to do with it? I'm going to 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, I him. And, uh, that's one of my favorite clips of all time.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's, and so I think the traits in him that I admire are just like, 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 lame when you're not talking about like saving the earth.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I tried. I tried.

Like when we're talking about like conversion rate optimization or B2B, dude, in fact, Will, we kind of, my generation and the generation before me, we, you know, what do they say? Hard times create, or no, like we need hard men to create soft times. That's what I did for you. You know, we went and did the B2B software stuff so you guys could do this fun, amazing stuff. So really, you're welcome.

Thank you, 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 to run or whatever, you feel free, but I just got to ask you about these. So I want to 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 people who like conspiracy theories. So can you just give me a rant on why conspiracy theories are underrated here?

I think, isn't it funny how contrarian is this like really positive description and conspiracy theorist is like this like negative description? You know what I mean? It's the same thing.

I just think it's very important to, you know, have weird ideas and take them seriously, right? Like, if we just had heard the seagrass idea and just like rubbished 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 non-verbal 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 spacetime, 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 dudes. So they're like, if anything, if not, if nothing else, like, they're just like, it's like, it's just like a fun thing to kind of like spend your time reading about.

On here you talk about aliens. We are with Joe Gebbia recently, who's like the 90th richest person in the world. And I was like, Joe, look, you're worth like $10 billion. 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. Joe, and he went on a big, he had a big diatribe on his passion for UFOs and aliens and how he absolutely is on board with them.

100% is on board with them. What is it?

He came off very passionately, like it is absolutely a thing.

And the funny thing is, if you meet Joe, he's a serious dude. Joe doesn't just say wild shit for wild shit's sake. Joe's not like, oh, he's a kooky billionaire. No, I don't know. Joe is like an extremely principled artist. He is a, uh, a very serious individual. And so for him to say something like that, it's not like— 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 your readers want to go down this rabbit hole, the best website I recommend going is a website a friend of mine runs, uapevidence.com.

Is there any other dope conspiracy, uh, that I should go look into, a rabbit hole would waste a nice 5 hours of my time.

Uh, I think less 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 it.

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 2 decades, right? It's basically the teachers and parents of children with non-verbal autism because because they've been convinced that their kids have been able to read their mind. And now, for the first time, with teaching kids how to spell on iPads and also getting researchers in to study them, they're actually verifying these telepathic capabilities. Right? So a mother will go into one room and she'll be shown a random number generator, and her son, Akhil, in the other room will hit the exact same 3 numbers 100% of the time consistently Tess.

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 NPR skeptical, let me call it, right? So she, she comes in, she's like, this didn't make a ton of sense, but I'm open-minded.

And she turned—

I didn't finish the whole thing. I listened probably the first 2 or 3, 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 By the way, Will, did you walk away from that, you know, half convinced, three-fourths convinced, totally convinced? What did you walk away?

I was going into it already with some sort of like priors that I thought that like consciousness isn't local to the brain. Like we like to think that like our brain is this kind of like DVD player 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. Gone, right? They just like know, right? Like, there's like, 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 and they're like, I couldn't sleep then after that, and they wake up the next day, they hear about this awful accident or something like that. Or you have like this like knowingness and these other things, like just like telepathy, twins telepathy and stuff. And there's like this world of parapsychology, which is like the study of these kind of psi phenomena. There's like actually very reproducible experiments in it, like the Ganzfeld experiment experiment, which if you allow me to go on this very short rabbit hole, but the most reproducible experiment in this field is basically you take two people, you put them in two separate rooms. These could be twins, these could be a 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'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 5 minutes, I talk about elephants, I saturate my brain with Africa wild animals in savannah. You're in the other room, you're listening to white noise, and you're talking basically about what you're sensing, feeling, that they could be about. And then at the end of the 5 minutes, I've— I stop and you get replayed what you were saying to yourself for 5 minutes, and you get the 4 random images and you get to pick one of the 4. And then you would assume, if complete chance, you know, you would— 25% chance of getting it right. But pretty consistently you get like 30% or above in this like experiment. And then when there's like twin husbands and wives, um, or artists, they actually score like more consistently 35, in some instances like 70%, in some of these experiments. And so I've always kind of been like primed 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 see this, and it's like very good experimental evidence and really well done, and I'm like, okay, nah, that's 100% 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 like 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 bummed that I grew up in the B2B era of startups. Yeah, so bummed. Well, I wish, like, I wish I was 10 years younger. You were 10. I wish we could have hung out.

Dude, let's grab some beers.

I went to a bachelor party this weekend and everybody on the girl— it was a bachelor party where the bachelors and the bachelorettes were were both at doing it together, basically as a party together. And the bachelorette side was so cool. Like, 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? Yeah, just 7 or 8 of those. 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, who's dating who. Anybody could be dating anybody in the room. It was insane. I just felt like, I literally felt like I came from a, I was a caveman and I was like, or like, you know, like 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 variance, right? Like it just like, 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 schizo people like me that will burn your ear off with conspiracy theories and go down these weird rabbit holes. But I think you also, it's like on the more negative end, that could send you down some pretty dark places that maybe you wouldn't be a productive member of society if you go down into those very dark corners of the internet. Or similarly, you have people who are doing great things, but then you also, I think there is a very interesting question that's posed in technology right now is is like, where are the kind of like less than kind of $25 billion company founders? This is like an interesting question that I think is still not really like, there's no satisfying answers around. Like previous generations had like the Collisons pretty early. We had like Alexander Wang, who's maybe 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 Hula Season or Rainmaker or others to to get there. But there is definitely like a, I think, a bigger skew in both the ideas that young people are interested in today. I think that's like broadly just like downstream of, um, yeah, technology.

Are you going to become an American?

Uh, yeah, I think I'm gonna get— I'm on the green card path.

Yeah. My last question was the spiritual one. You said you lived with Buddhist monks in Nepal and for a summer you 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. From it. 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. And then you said something like, I came to— I came to explain my 5 desires or 6 desires. Can you just give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at?

Yeah, so yeah, I just, um, kind of want— I just had heard that you, you could do this, right? You can actually just like find a monastery to basically put you up if you teach them English. So I did that, found a monastery in Nepal that would like put me up. It's pretty rural, a few hours outside, um, uh, Kathmandu. Went there, through there, taught them. I taught myself to teach 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.

Because there's just a— there's just 5 monks with like a thick Irish accent speaking English out there. They're like, yeah, I learned from an expert.

Wild actual segue. I was out running in the middle of Nepal one day and I bumped into a dude who was wearing a Galway Bay 5K t-shirt. And I was like, sorry, now 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 was like, had like kind of 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, what's this like Irish guy's name? The Irish guy he named was like the one Irish guy that my, my neighbor, who's like my mom's friend— my mom's friend was like, my mom was worried about me going to Nepal. She's like, well, you know, you need to have a contact in Nepal when you go over there, you know. I was like, and this isn't— my neighbor knew a 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 Irish people everywhere, everyone just talking like kind of like all these monks are They're like, little bit kind of—

I boxed up— they're like, you'll do nothing.

I boxed the bollocks off them.

Yeah, you'll do nothing.

Literally, there's people everywhere. We have, we have, we have people everywhere. That's like the kind of moral.

Is that what the monks are saying? We didn't hear to come— we didn't come to take part, we came to take over.

All right, so, so sorry. So you go there and you're, uh, yeah, I'm curious about the region.

I'm asking questions about it, but one thing I just couldn't get over was like, you know, they 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? Because that leads to like, you know, Keeping Up with the Joneses type lifestyle, um, or maybe like, you know, kind of like, you know, the fatties on, on the chair at Walmart kind of like thing, you know? Like, that's like probably like when it goes maybe too far.

Hey, you better watch it, Will.

That's our demo.

You better watch what you're saying.

You got a girlfriend?

No. That was your reaction to his story about the Buddhist monks and like realizing the meaning of life.

You want to— dude, you tell me an Irish guy with that in his Tinder profile, isn't he just going to destroy the whole city?

Give me a break. Saving the world, saving the world's seagrass. Former monk. Sam's 5 desires: family, health, wealth, fitness, and will. Those are Sam's 5 desires.

This is so good, man. You're the best.

Well, this is awesome. People should check you out.

Where?

On Twitter. You're Will O'Brien. What's your handle?

@WillOBry.

W-I-L-L-O-B-R-Y.

Try. Okay, great. And, uh, good luck with the company, man.

Thank you, dude.

Thank you. All right, that's it. That's the pod.

Thank you.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.