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

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

[free] Episode 694: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Will O’Brien ( https://x.com/willobri ) about how the ocean is the new hot girl.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Ocean is the new space (8:50) Ocean surveying (10:25) Sea grass restoration (16:39) Defense drones (22:34) Underwater cable networks (31:51) Technology windows (38:16) Lab-grown seafood (41:03) Pirate treasure profit sharing (44:03) Marine geo-engineering (47:43) A new era for tech guys (57:52) Who Will admires (1:01:00) Underrated conspiracy theories (1:10:27) Becoming a monk — Links: • Ulysses - https://www.ulysses.eco/  • Saildrone - https://www.saildrone.com/  • Saronic - https://www.saronic.com/  • Wildtype Foods - https://www.wildtypefoods.com/  • Rainmaker - https://www.rainmaker.com/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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 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 we 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 can rule to want to. Let's travel.

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-plus companies about exploring space, about putting satellites in space. about reusable rockets and that there's an opportunity for a similar wave 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 listen 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 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, I was at a party the other day and the, 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'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? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the framing is like, you know, something like this. It's like, you know, everyone is like here standing on Earth, like looking towards the stars. And absolutely, we, you know, we should be doing that. And we should be going like, you know, full pelt with like trying to go interplanetry, trying to put a base on the moon and take, you know, take the, you know, take the. take the dark side of the moon and then go from there and use that as a line going to go to Mars. And we should be trying to fly supersonic as well. But then look, if you're trying to build a startup, like you're always asking yourself, like, where, you know, what is everyone else looking to do? And like, where is everyone else going and where is like underrated?

And I suppose, you know, I grew up by the seaside in like 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 wrong in the same way that you're afraid some of it. And yeah, I'm kind of like when I'm away from it, I feel something wrong with me. So I've always been thinking about it. And I mean, if you just 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 going to be massive. Like the ocean economy is massive. It's like $3 trillion in like annual spend in different ways. Right, it covers like 70% to the planet. And three billion people rely on it as their primary source of food. A billion is there, as their, as their,

their primary source of income. And then, you know, while we have like, you know, robots and Mars and, you know, these like low-cost 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 are like, you know, pretty much like the same as well there. Like the kind of key core technology stack supporting like 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 steel 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 ask someone, like, what is like a sexy ocean startup? And it's like, they're kind of scratching their heads for a bit. You know, whereas you ask them about space, it's like SpaceX straight away. It's like, you know it's straight away. It's like, you ask them about aerospace. It's like, oh, boom.

So, yeah, this is like the kind of like, the kind of like, the core of the thesis. Sean, you just wound him up really easily. This is going to be one of those podcasts that we've had, we've only had maybe five 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, I, I, let's go. So Sam,

he's 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 the ocean for the primary source of income. Three billion is 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 like 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 a EU. 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 it's important, 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 are you talking

about fisheries, shipping? Is it like defense? Like, what is that the, are those the big three? Or am I missing something big and obvious? 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, right? Which is like your fisheries, it's your ecosystem and restoration. It's like your environmental mapping. It's science. in the ocean, it's like all around like biosphere management. Then you have like, you know, 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. It's your like data infrastructure, you know, these sorts of things. It's your like logistics, shipping. And then you have like, you know, keeping the seas 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 a real. well as 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 on-man system space that's been around for for a long time, I think over a decade now. And it 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 sail drone do? I suppose they are solving the kind of data gathering at scale in the ocean problem. They build these like autonomous sailboats, these huge vessels.

they look amazing they look awesome they build these huge vessels at that these massive sailboats that can basically stay out 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 you know gather video footage at the surface

and these sorts of things and then relay them back to someone like in the United States it might be like a state a government agency like Noah who want to know

how much fish is in the in the Alaska in the seas off Alaska, they could sell it to the US Navy to know, you know, how deep is the waters in and around Guam, or something like that. And then they sell these things as a service. But, you know, they're very interesting founder there. You know, it seems like a super sharp guy who's been obsessed with sailing for decades. Again, like a lot of these ocean founders, 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, what's your business do, Will? What's Ulysses? Ulysses or Ulysses. Ulysses. Yeah, yeah. Ulysses were building a general purpose, autonomy platform for maritime operations. Say that like we're stupid. Just like, just pretend.

Pretend that we're stupid. Yeah, I know it's hard to believe. But just go ahead and dump that down for me. autonomous robots for the ocean to do important things. Okay. And what's one important thing that you would do? You would, like for example, you would go to a pipe in the ocean

and determine if it's got a hole in it? That is something you could do. Our first business line has been working with this weird plant that you've probably never heard of. There's this plant in the ocean that's probably about 10 times more abundant than coral reefs. It is 35 times better than rainforest at removing carbon. It supports about, it holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean, supports about a quarter of the world's most critically important fish stocks. And it's called seagrass. It's basically just grass in the ocean.

and this plant is dying off at insane rate all around the world. About 7% loss per annum. If you follow these trends, we lose all our... 7% a year of this thing is going away. And why is it dying? Is it because pollution or what's the cost? 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 like coastlines, digging it up, dredging, changing ocean temperatures, changing like ocean currents, these sorts of things, impact it. And basically, you know, 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 rely on it for food and the billion people for income.

And, you know, they're in a, they're in a tough situation. And basically restoring it, i.e. bringing it back is currently a very massive. 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 like track them.

Yeah. So for this first use case, 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 kind of 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 dock together, you know, we might have trouble getting traction. But we started off with this initial use case. We basically built these like attachments that go on to our underwater vehicle that do collecting seeds, planting seeds, measuring their growth to kind of get this initial traction.

So, you know, in our first year we did a million dollars. And in revenue just kind of like, you know, first first year, five person team based here in San Francisco. Why would someone pay you to do this? So the reason people pay us is because it's, you know, it's a critically important, like, ocean ecosystem that, you know, if lost, has these, like, very negative downstream impacts. Yeah, that's, like, you know, one reason. Another reason is, like, lots of governments now around the world have implemented laws that restrict your ability to damage this plant. Or if you damage it, you have to pay someone to plant it. So they're paying us to plant it.

It's compliance-driven restoration. So that's the kind of contract we've contracted Western Australia. contract in Florida, we've contracted in Virginia, and they're all kind of for like these general reasons, are they're compliance-driven restoration or voluntary-led restorations. Sam, I put, how important is seagrass into chat GPT? Here's what I said. Seagrass is wildly important to the world. And it basically says it captures carbon 35 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 small fish, crabs, seahorses, and even endangered species and turtles.

they're born and they live early on in their life. And if lost, then you would, it says, lose the seagrass and entire marine ecosystems collapse. Yeah. Well, what's crazy is you, okay, the mission check, like on board, amazing. Do you kind of skip the headline, Sean? Did we, he built a robotics business set in the first year. 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 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 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 bucks or whatever. Is there something that does, that's made it a lot cheaper or maybe just 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. You know, it's easier now to get parts overnight as well and just like get like she muddle, she metal cut. And the cost of a lot of things 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. You know, for us as well, like a critical enabler of what we do, right, is Starlink because, you know, the way our system works is like we have this

like autonomous boat. It's like a surface vehicle. This is like our mothership. And then we have a docking system that releases these, these daughter robots, these like autonomous underwater vehicles to do the actual critical activity in the ocean that you want to do. And, you know, we wouldn't be able to communicate with these assets without something like Starlink. You had a radium before, but like the bandwidth on that wasn't that strong. And so you have like other like kind of, kind of wind-out features like that. And that company, you were talking about Sail Drone. They've raised like over $100 million.

It looks like they're valued $500 to a billion. That's interesting. There's another one called Soronic. Sam, do you know Seronic? No. How do you spell it? S-A-R-O-N-I-C. Well, you probably know a little bit more about this company than me.

I think this Joe Lonsdale ceded 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 building

drone like drones for the water and drones in the way for defense just like Andrew's doing it for the sky and and you know 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 number. Oh, I don't know. 500? What? 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 300 ships in the Navy. Is a ship considered like an aircraft carrier? Because those are huge,

right? Those are like cities. Sure. Oh my God. But only 300. That's just like a very small number to me. And we have 67 submarines. That's it? 67. Dude, I had more kids at my three-year-old birthday party. That's insane to me. So we got 300 ships or whatever. And basically every ship is like, I don't know the exact cost of it, but let me, let me pull. So I think they're like, will correct me if I'm wrong, but like the average cost of these is something like, or maybe established cost of these contracts like $250 million. Every time you get a contract to do one of these. And so you're a startup like Serronic and you're like all you have to do is basically say, all right, we're going to come in.

We're going to build the most innovative, autonomous. vehicles here and we're going to operate, you know, what Anderil did was, was remarkable. So what Andrewill 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 going to make weapons. That was not cool at the time. And it was, there was basically zero, uh, zero weapons startups in San Francisco.

And what they did was they said, we're going to do this. We're going to use the Silicon Valley method. talent to do this, we're going to change the cost structure. So all the big defense primes were operating on what's called cost plus model. And so their incentive really was to have really high cost operations because they were making 10% 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 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 the Anderil comes out, Paul Mulachie and Trey and others, they basically came out, and what they said was, 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 a $20 to $30 billion company doing this. And the reason I find this exciting is that 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 20 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 Elon looked down at the ground and saw a trillion-dollar opportunity that was just sitting there. You know, before Elon, it's not like there were a bunch of people trying to build, you know, rocket companies or electric car companies. 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 the 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 Anderil did that in the defense space. And now it looks like Serronic is basically doing that in the sort of ocean defense space where, you know, you have this combination of elite talent at robotics and AI and autonomy. And you pair it with this old industry. And I think you have a pretty unique window to build a very big company doing this.

Yeah, like they're building, I think of it, like, they're building the Humvees and we're building the Toyota Hyluxes, right? Like, they're building like these like ultra-fast, like defense focused, like vehicles. And like they're, you know, going to make the South China Sea a hellscape and make China now want to cross 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. And then we have, we occupy like a different niche, like, we're like, we just want like every single like, you know, day to day task that is like done at sea. We want to 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 fought in the last like three decades until now has been like in a desert. Right. Now we're going to the ocean that requires a complete retooling of the military, you know, and just even how we think about warfare, it's fundamentally needs to change. Like, the climate question is ultimately 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, 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 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 we'll let's go back. So there's there's already pipes under the ocean that basically

internet pipes under the ocean, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean most of the, most of the information that tried our internet connection now most of that is like traveling through, is traveling underground. Who built that? Is that the government built that or Google built that? Who put those pipes in the ocean to do that? So a lot of the initial infrastructure build out for IT in the ocean came from telecoms companies, actually.

Yeah, like in the 80s, Sean, 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 in the ocean but a lot of them are still around they're just like small B 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 well maybe I don't know if you know this if I but in the 80s that was like the the birth of a lot of this, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, massively. And now you're seeing a transition to the build like being coming from, Fang, 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 a, 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 to, 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 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 uh sam mandel 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 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 and like the Baltic Sea in places, but like I think in the last year, about 11 cables have been cut by foreign actors. and like, you know, basically they kind of have... And these cables, by the way, they're like a... 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 a rope that you're pulling.

It's like a tunnel, right? And like, okay, like literally 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 roller. They're not even, they're not even fucking hiding this.

Like, they're, 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 part of them. And then, like, you know, they send these, like, little, like, 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 would hear. Dude, calling this a cable cutter is like calling a robo a ship. You know what I mean?

Like maybe technically it's correct, but they need to rebrand this because what you're showing us is basically 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 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 and like to say China's view, right? First target then is going to be like a military base in like the Pacific, somewhere like Guam, right? 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 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 you're talking to two dummies.

How many cables does America rely on? There's like not actually that many, right? Like as in like there's like an insane amount of data that goes over them, but there's only about like 600 active. 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 very difficult to let. 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 of course you need to be persistently out at sea like sentry style in the same way that like andro 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 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 so surface. And that fund made that's like the platform that we've developed. We have this like surface vehicle with a docking system that can drop a number of water vehicle and we've made it like all about 10 times cheaper than anyone else. So like that's, you know, sea grass is like a nice place where we started. How deep do your vehicles go? Do they go to the like 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 like a major, the major kind of like, you know, activity, area of activity

where this is going right now. So our vehicle works in that sea, you know, at all depth profiles in that sea. So for the Baltic Sea part of it, it is, it works. When you get into like narrower 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, we will be adding future vehicles to the feed that can be that old.

How old are you will? I'm 27. Sean, so when you and I moved to San Francisco and, 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 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 then there was a bunch of silly things. 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 in a few other things. I was 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. Like 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? Yeah, exactly. The boomers got cheap real estate. You guys got like V to be like 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 form of media hardware. And then like also it's like it's like a no brainer. You look at like the top 10 most valuable 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 CRM or a sales for or not maybe not salesperson, but like a calendar league competitor. It's like, okay, well, is there really a moat 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 it. So when Sean and I lived in San Francisco, 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 like, if you were to talk about what you're talking about, it would have been like, you're so out of touch. You're out of touch for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, C 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 Creer.

And he has this thing about technology windows. Sam, did you ever see this part? No. About technology windows. So he basically says, all right, there's a reason. There's a, there's a, there's a, almost like a scientific. reason 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 change. So, for example, an inflection. So when we,

you're right, when we first moved to San Francisco, I moved in 2012 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 GPS feature in it, and then all these companies could get built. But that window opens for a very, like a fixed amount of time, and basically, like he said, the low-hanging fruit all gets eaten.

And so he went back all the way to the railroads. And he's like, the railroad technology window was open for 40 years. And if you just look, there was not another successful railroad company after that 40-year period. And because all the opportunities basically got eaten, automobiles was 25 years. And so in a 25-year window, you got Buick, Dodge, Ford, Cadillac, GM, Chevrolet, Lincoln, Chrysler,

all of it within a very short window. And then you had nothing for another about 80 years. And then the window reopened because of battery technology. And you got Tesla and Rivian. And so that was almost a new technology window around automobiles because the tech had changed again around batteries. And so he was basically saying like B2B SaaS has had a 20-year window and now AI software, AI starting in 2016,

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 smart entrepreneurs are doing right now is there in the technology window of AI, robotics, and 3D printing. And basically those three technologies have opened up the door to build new things that couldn't have been built 10, 15, 20 years ago. So this is what a technology would it looks like. Just check this out. If you're on audio, you have to be on YouTube to see this. But 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 cover of time barefoot because the hobbyist internet guy became rich by building, you know, the browser. And then this happened again with social networking. This happened again with Elon and Palmer Lucky and all those guys right now who've had their status moment where, you know, Palmer was like literally like living in. a RV building VR headsets for like 90 bucks using spare parts. He was a hobbyist. And then the hobbyist got the wealth, the status moment when he sold to Facebook for $3 billion. And then, you know, same thing with Elon. Elon was building in relative obscurity, both Open AI. You know, opening I was a nonprofit. It was relatively obscure for the first five years that it was out that they were doing

that thing. But now Sam Altman and Elon and Palmer again with Andrew have had a new status moment. And then there's what he calls knowledge diffusion, which is 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 the new incumbent regime takes over due to their defensibility.

Like they build something that is defensible. Maybe because it's hardware. Maybe it requires scale. Maybe it has a network effect. And the technology window is 90% percent. closed and you'll only have a few exceptions from there on out. It's so funny to, Sean, to meet Will, who's, like, in the thick of 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 you're doing? Like, when were you messing around with drones or ocean tech? So, yeah, I mean, like, like, I, like, as I said, I've been, like, you know, in the ocean, on the ocean, near the ocean, since I was a kid, diving, surfing, you know, whatever. weightboarding, all these sorts of things growing up, but never, never had built in it, really, before this kind of scooter sharing startup thing popped off. I was like, you know, working,

you know, in that. My co-founders all kind of had been tinkering 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 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.

Like, you know, to really actually shake up an industry, it's probably good if you don't come from it because we came to it and like, you know, 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 subsie drones on the market and they were crap. They cost like, you know, they were like, one of the ones who were looking at. out which like actually had the specs that would have met what we wanted to do cost like 500 grand that's like a quarter of our preseat to do what we want like it's like and then like my my our cTO jamie he just like went into a cave for a few days and just like came back with like a

design for like a new type of like autonomous water vehicle and then we like tested and we're like oh shit this works oh shit it's like 10 20 times cheaper than like anything we could have bought you know so it's like sometimes you just need like a new idea and like an all artist to go into a cave and then you can you can like change things that's how all the great things that's 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 end yeah that does work yes I thought earlier about 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 something innovative? Yeah, yeah. My friends 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 cultivating? It's grown. It's grown. It's not like farmed or caught at sea. Like grown in a lab or grown? Yeah, like in a, yeah, exactly in this like industrial process. Yeah, they can basically grow cells 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 sports car, right there starting off with like a, 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 like similar. Similar ideas. I mean, look, breweries are like where so much of the like best kind of biotech innovation has like come like from people building like mass industrial processes for, 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.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I got it through. from 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, farm 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 it tastes, 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 exactly yeah but I think this stuff is like sooner than we think it's around the quire Wow these guys did a hundred million dollar Series B in 2022

that's pretty crazy what else is cool Tom Will tell me everything what the guys like you are into like some more ocean shit some crazy ones yes yeah okay all right

this one 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 of the Portuguese still have

claim on these things. However, there is precedent in history for you to do these kinds of of like profit sharing agreements, right? 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 keep some? You can do this, right? It's like these models where it's like these SaaS negotiation companies are like, hey, if we go and save you money on your vendors,

we get a cut. We keep 20% is 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. He went off the coast and just, what, scuba dive? Well, what was you 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 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 code. 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. So there's like fundamentally two parts of like a mission. It's like, or three parts. There's like, you know, the pre-mission, you know, negotiating like, you know, looking to

start 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 some chance of being able to hold onto 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 seat bed and understand what's there. And then there's like recovery where you're bringing out these like gnarly like JCP 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 dollars? 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 it. But there is like some exciting developments coming in this space that we may or may not be

helping with. Did you, did you say there's three million shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean? So I'm not sure speaking 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. Wow. Okay. That's insane.

What else? So there's, okay. I'll give you like a banger quote, right? There's this like Canadian billionaire called Ross, who had this quote a few years ago he said, give me a tanker of 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 dunking iron into the ocean, right?

So basically like many, many parts of the ocean are low in iron. They need more iron. And if you add iron to these parts 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 we have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We also want more fish. But you need to balance it because you don't want to put too much in

and then just like there's too much salmon and then there's like salmon take over like the certain like ecosystem which is maybe like not good or something. You know, there's basically, we're doing stuff in, like, with ecosystems, it's very, like, difficult to predict how things are going to pan out. So, you need to be careful.

So this dude didn't, wasn't, did do 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 where he just, like, basically dumped off a load of iron filings, removed, through his quantifications, like, thousands of tons of carbon. They're off the coast there that year. They had like the biggest like take of salmon ever as a result. But the kind of desal of Hardies did not like his experimentation and like the Canadian golden with like the CIA like busted his home and he got like yeah, like a warrant and

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 going to be like a billion dollar company built in like marine geoengineering of some description. There's this, so I'm Catholic, so it's like, there's this, like, a lot of my beliefs around, like, my environmentalism and stuff, that comes from, like, this Christian 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 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. we actually just like control, you know, we, we steward the planet, right? We like, we take control. We get involved.

We, you know, someone like Augustus, a rainmaker can make it rain when we wanted to rain. You know, someone like UCCs can come in and bring back the, the sea grasses when we need the sea grasses. 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 going to, we're going to have to build these tools, right? Because these, we need these in tandem with growing the size of the economic pie. if we want to keep doing that. You know, we don't want to just, like, shut down the 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, under-explored space. I think the main things we need to get right there are science, better science on it, better technology and governance, the governance about it because the ocean is, like, a public space. It's like, you know, you just need to get the governance power right.

Have you seen, Sean, have you seen this guy? Augustus, the founder of Rainmaker. Incredible mullet. Oh my God. 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 man or they're, like, they're not, they're not like this engineer or, 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 going to take over the world to be billionaires or if you're going to go broke, but it's only going to be one of the two. Do you understand, Sean, like this new genre that I'm trying to describe? I don't know exactly what I'm saying. Well, maybe you can like put words to it. But there's this new like breed that Austin and San Francisco had a baby. You get the stash in 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, Augustus, I think his name is, he's on the cover, I think of Forbes or something, and he's sitting on a bench press, like a, like a, like a working out. That is not something that Brian Chesky or, you know, Travis Kalanick would have done in 2012. I think it's emblematic of like, of kind of the evolution of the technology industry, though. I think like, you know, 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, 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, we're actualizing on the sense of the body, right?

Like, we're, like, becoming strong. And, like, you have, like, full integration of, like, mind, body and spirit. And it's, like, no wonder that this, like, tech becoming, like, fully actualized on all of the access that, like, 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, it's 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 like spiritually like aligned. It's like mentally they're 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 yes, 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 us beautiful monologue.

Maybe the most beautiful four minutes in all of film is the last four minutes of Ratatoui here. the monologue. Will, I think you're up there with the last four minutes of Rattahooie 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 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 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 extended that to, you know, the entrepreneurial will has grown in that way. Look at Bezos and Zogberg, they're getting jacked. Like they're doing TRT.

They look like, look, like, this is like, I think this is problematic of like the spirit is in technology now. It's like you have the like, you know, one of my favorite podcasts besides yours, you know, the tech bros and like what Jordi and John are doing there. It's like they're like, they're, you know, the technology brothers. They're like leaning into the fact that you're like tech pros. 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 with them like sipping Dom Perrinion. 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 going to be like at like the events and functions anymore kind of lying about what we're not neutered. Dude, listen to this. I got an email from this guy named Jamie at the Wall Street Journal. So Jamie is 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 Western wear. So basically cowboy clothes in the past recent years. And I want to write about how the Techboro 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 don't think I can talk. Like this is not going to be. Also, life win that he thinks you're the expert to go to. right?

Yeah, life win. But I was like, I'm not exactly in tech, but that's amazing that you think that I,

like, I am a fashion influencer officially. No. Reply, mission accomplished. 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 in

like jumping around and like doing backflips and shit. Like there's no difference between the two videos. It's the same video to me. It's one of those days that everyone remembers where they were when they saw it. 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 the Buzz Dynamics Robot. Well, one lot of last questions.

Can I invest? Yeah. Yeah, great. Okay, cool. Because I think this is awesome. You guys are, you guys are insane, man. This energy is so wild. I'm not convinced that it's going to 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 Andrel, 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. That would be better if they called him Parker. Parker, sorry. A 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 probably eight out of ten times that idea is right, right? Where like there's an incumbent and like they fail because it's really hard and there's centuries 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 you. It does not work. All right. Listen, that guy, John, 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? Three mullets. I need 97 more mullets and I'll give you a 10x return. Okay. Give me the fund. I'll find the mullet for you. You find the mullet.

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 have to. Right.

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 brain power 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, B2B, HR or whatever software. And instead, now we peeled off a portion of that talent. And now we sent, you know, 100 mullets at these problems. And I think 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 show you

what we're doing is very real. You wouldn't have a million dollars in our bank account 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, the door is always open, Sam. Same for you, Shab. I got to ask you two quick questions. Number one, seagrass seems so random.

And if you started this company, you might have thought, oh, I'll do drones, like for warfare. How did you arrive at the seagrass thing? Was it instant? Was that the initial idea? Or did you do some discovery to figure that out? Who 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 kind of, the same one who went into the cave and designed our AUV went, I heard about sea grass, I went into cave and went deep on sea grass and came back to us and presented like, this is a very interesting space. He heard about sea grass on a surf trip from who? A marine biologist, friend of his, who is working on a body.

A guy out in the wave? Yeah. Dude, this co-founder is absolutely carrying your company. Yeah. He's built the tech and figured out to go to marketing. I love it. The, well, yeah, he found, he was the one who brought seagrass to us. And then myself and my other co-founderers kind of put it together.

I'm like, this is what the business probably should look like. But then, yeah, we kind of 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, 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 it's a pretty big market. You can, you'll bring cash into your business as like a lifeblood. and 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 start off on. And then yes, we're going to 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? Steve Irwin, probably. Dude, motherfucker.

I was going to say this earlier on. I go, you are Steve Irwin. I knew you got C vibes, hardcore, man. You got a khaki shorts on right now? No, 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, no, he's, um, yeah, I'm hopeful I can get the, the Irwin family, uh, on the Ulysses train at some point.

We got a, we got a holler at Bindy, Bindy Irwin. That would be great. Robert as well. I love those guys. Yeah, Robert as well. Yeah, you know, look, Steve, I think is like, and it's so funny, you know, people say Steve on a podcast and the tech. it's like Steve Jobs.

It's like for me, it's like Steve. You should have just said Steve at the beginning and then let us fall into your track. Dude, Sean, there's this famous video. I know you've seen this well. There's a famous video of,

it's Steve Irwin and his wife. What's her name? 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, Sam, Sam. Just look.

Just look what's on my screen. Just look what's on my screen right now. Oh, there it is. Thank you. Just look what I was pulling up because. I love that clip. brother. I love this 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 going to 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 going to do with it? I'm going to buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get go 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 his wife's just like eyeing him. And that's one of my favorite clips of all time. Yeah, it's so I think the traits in him that I'm like raw passion. It's like

just like unbridled passion. It's like this like nonsensical passion. It's like, you think I'm going to have a conversation without a microphone? No, I'm going to put a microphone there. I'm going to record a podcast. I'm going to record a podcast every day. And I don't give a rip who's listening. Because you know what?

I'm a podcaster. And I'm going to podcast my ass off. It's a whole lot more lame, 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 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, you know, Sam, if you got to run or whatever, 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, but I think it's like, you know, a lot of the traits of like conspiracy theorists or like those of like a great like founder. I think like someone that like believes in something that everyone else tells them is like not real 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 just like go down these like rabbit holes and 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 an ability to see the world differently 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 how weird ideas to take them seriously right like if we just had heard this grass idea and just like rublished 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, blindly believe every report of telepathy and nonverbal autistic children or 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, we 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 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 anything else, like they're just like it's like a fun thing to kind of like spend your time reading about. On here you talk about aliens. We are with Joe Gebia 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 a Luminati, 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 big, he had a big diatribe on his passion for like, you know, UFOs and aliens and how he absolutely is on board with them. 100%. He 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 single. serious dude. 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, no, no. Joe is like an extremely principled artist. He is a, 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 John McAfee was the guy saying it, you know what I mean? If your readers want to go down this, Robert, all the best website I recommend going is a website. A friend of mine runs UAPEvidence.com. any other dope conspiracy that I should go look at you, a rabbit hole that would waste a nice five hours of my time? I think it lies of a conspiracy, more like wacky, weird rabbit hole you need to go down

is you need to listen to the telepathy tapes podcast. I have and I love them. What is this? Is this like I can read your mind? So basically there's this group of people that people have been tall and crazy for like the last like two decades, right? It's basically the teachers and parents of children are 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, like, getting 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, Akiel, and the other room will hit the exact same three numbers, 100% 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 NPR skeptical, let me call it, right? So she comes in, she's like, this didn't make a ton of sense, but I'm open-minded. Is she turned? I didn't finish the whole thing. I listened to 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 going to do this right. 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. We're like conscious is playing and it's like being played to us and that's how we experience things. I think we're more like I was 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 their son dies in an accident and they just know something's wrong.

Right. They just like no. Right. Like there's like you know everyone, every family has these stories 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 then they wake up the next day

they hear about this awful accident or something like that or you have like there's like knowingness and these other things like just like telepathy twins telepity and stuff and there's like this world of parapsychology which is like the study of these kind of sawy 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-wise 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, 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 and four different pictures. I get a picture of an element. For five minutes, I talk about elephants. I saturate my brain with Africa and 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 five minutes, I've stopped. and you get replayed while 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 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 twins husband and wives and 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, no, 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 it's 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 bombed. Well, I wish I was 10 years younger. You were 10 years. 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, it was a bachelor party where the bachelors and the bacheloretts were both 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. just seven or eight 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, 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 like kind of like schizo people like me that will like burn your ear off by like it's weird theories and like you know go down like these weird rabbit holes. But like I think you also it's like on the like maybe on the more negative end 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, and or similarly like it's, you know, you have people who are like doing like great things, but then you also like, you know, I think there is like a very interesting question that's posed in technology right now is like, you know, where are the, you know, the kind of like less

than kind of 25, you know, billion dollar 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 Collison's pretty early. 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 whether there isn't one in this generation. Maybe we have to wait another year or two for companies like he was season or rainmaker or others to like to get there. But there is definitely like 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 yeah, technology. Are you going to become an American? Yeah, I think I'm going to get. I'm on the green carriage path. Yeah. 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. And so you, and then you said, like, you know,

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 explain my five desires or six desires. Can you just give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at? Yeah.

Yeah, so yeah, I just kind of want, I just had heard that 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 did that. Found a monastery in Nepal that would like put me up. It's pretty rural, a few hours outside. And Camandu went there, through there, taught them, I taught myself to teaching it before. I came over, I 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 five 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, 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 an Irish accent. He's like, oh, well, you know, I actually work with. an Irish guy. 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. He was like, well, you know, you need to have a contact in Nepal when you go over there. You know, I was like, and it's 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 like little bit of kind of i boxed they're like you'll do nothing i boxed the bullocks off them yeah you'll do nothing literally there's others 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 well continue yeah i'm curious about the ridge and i'm asking them questions about it but one thing i just couldn't get over was like you know they don't believe in disaster Like they believe desire is like what leads to suffering.

If you desire for something, then you're creating a contract with yourself, be unhappy until you have that thing. And I'm just like, dude, I'm very like American dream pill. 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 like, you know, keeping up with the Jones's type lifestyle or maybe like, you know, kind of like, you know, kind of like, you know, the fatty's on and on the chair

at Walmart kind of like thing, you know, like that's like probably like when it goes like maybe like too far. Hey, you better watch it, Will. That's our demo. You better watch what you're saying. No, you're not that fat, saw. So anyway, so that's why 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 in things as little as possible.

And I had this like bizarre experience where 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 I well hadn't been thinking about it before and I genuinely think it was a download from you know something spiritual that like gave me like some guidance on how 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 10 day hike up to a base camp and I like was like thinking through it's like hey well if you

have no desire like what do you do it's like oh maybe you should have czar 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 had this like idea at the same time of like a rose bush. Rose bushes if you like leave them go unkept.

They basically just grow like ryeers 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 desiring for it. And I fend not to be helpful. You got a girlfriend? No. That was your reaction to his story about the Buddhist monks and like realizing the meaning of life? Dude, you tell me an Irish guy with that in his center profile,

isn't he just going to destroy the whole city? Give me a break. Saving the world sea grass, former monk, Sam's Five Desires, family, health, wealth, fitness, and will. Those are Sam's five 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? At Will O'Brien, O'BRI. Okay, great. And good luck with the company, man. Thank you, dude. All right, that's it. That's the part.

you. I feel like I can rule to want to. Let's travel never looking back.