7 Wild Business Ideas for this $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 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. Aight, 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, 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, uh, 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. Um, yeah, I think like, yeah, the framing is like, you know, something like this. It's like, you know, Everyone is here standing on Earth looking towards the stars, and absolutely, we should be doing that, and we should be going full pelt with trying to go interplanetary, trying to put a base on the moon and take the dark side of the moon and then go from there and use that as a landing point 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, you're always asking yourself, what is everyone else looking to do? And where is everyone else going? And where is underrated? I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland. I've always been obsessed with the ocean. If I wasn't on it, in it, or near it growing up, there was something wrong in the same way that you're afraid, Sam, of it. When I'm away from it, I feel something wrong with me. So I've always been thinking about it. If you just look at it in fundamental terms, the ocean economy right now is already massive. It's not like the future space economy is going be massive. The ocean economy is massive. It's $3 trillion in annual spend in different ways. It covers 70% of the planet. 3 billion people rely on it as their primary source of food, a billion as their primary source of income. And then while we have robots on Mars and these low-cost drones going in our skies, the technology in our oceans still pales in comparison. You look at the ships, that are out there today, much of the technology is very same and similar to what we had years ago. The unmanned underwater drones are pretty much the same as well there. The key core technology stack supporting the key pillars of the ocean, whether it be transport, fisheries, defense, energy, biodiversity, all these areas, it's just the same old stagnant incumbents, large-scale incumbents offering solutions that are running on ancient software, and there's just very little innovation going on there. It's like, you ask someone, like, what is a sexy ocean startup? And it's like, they're kind of scratching their heads for a bit. Whereas you ask them about space, it's like SpaceX straight away. It's like, you know it straight away. It's like, you ask them about aerospace, it's like, ah, boom. So yeah, this is the kind of like the core of the thesis.

Sean, you just wound him up really easily. This is gonna be one of those podcasts that we've had 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. So 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 the ocean for their 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 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— we've developed logistics, which means you can go down the street and walk into some sushi bar and get like bluefin tuna probably flew in last night from Japan. However, if you are in Mogadishu or Somalia or something like that, this might be a bit more difficult because the systems are not set up. And it's important to remember most of the world does not live in developed countries. So yeah, most humans just live along a coastline. Naturally then, easiest source of food for them to get is is 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, the framing for me, how I think about like the ocean economy, is like, uh, you, 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 like ecosystem restoration, it's like your environmental mapping, it's, um, science in the ocean. It's all around biosphere management. Then you have the prosperity-oriented part around it. This is 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 defense, defense and security, border security, critical infrastructure protection, deploying ships in the South China Sea, these sorts of things.

All right. A few episodes ago, I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and to explain. And that's what I'm about to do. So I told you guys how I use ChatGPT as a life coach or a thought partner. And what I did was I uploaded all types of amazing information. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, different books that I like, issues going on in my personal life and businesses. I uploaded so much information. And so the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future? Things like that. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing the audience, showing you the software that I used to make this, the information that I had ChatGPT ask me, all this stuff. So it's super easy for you to use and Like I said, I use this like 10 or 20 times a day. It's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. There's a link below. Just click it, enter your email, and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it again, 10 to 20 times a day. Um, all right. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.

And so 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 mean, there's, you know, a lot of these kind of like, you know, legacy players and like shipbuilding and like unmanned systems and these sorts of things. I think one player that's like 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 like autonomous sailboats, these huge vessels.

They look amazing. Yeah. 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 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. 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?

Ulysses. Yeah, yeah. Ulysses. At Ulysses, we're 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, yeah. I know it's hard to believe, but just go ahead and dumb that down for me.

Autonomous robots for the ocean to do 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 in this, 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 an insane rate all around the world, about 7% loss per annum. If you follow these trends, we lose all our seagrass.

7% a year of this thing is going away.

Okay.

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

Yeah, there's a few things. I mean, water quality is a very common 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, 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 1 billion people who rely on it and 3 billion people who, rely on it for food and the ability 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.

Yeah, so for this first use case, we've built a kind of custom robotic payload. You know, like 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 hoped that people would use it 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 onto our underwater vehicle that do collecting seeds, planting seeds, measuring their growth, to get this initial traction. So in our first year, we did $1 million in revenue, just for first year, 5-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 a critically important ocean ecosystem that, if lost, has these very negative downstream impacts. That's one reason. Another reason is 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, we have a contract in Florida, we've contracted Virginia, and they're all kind of for like these general reasons, either compliance-driven restoration or voluntary-led restorations.

Sam, I put, uh, how important is seagrass into ChatGPT. Here's what I said: seagrass is wildly important to the world. And that basically says it captures carbon 35 times faster than rainforests, 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, uh, species and turtles, um, they're born and they live early on in their life. And if lost, then you would 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 you, 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 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 get sheet metal, CAD. And the cost of a lot of things has gone down massively as well. With the advent of 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 like a surface vehicle. This is like our mothership. And then we have a docking system that releases these daughter robots, these autonomous underwater vehicles to do the actual critical activity in the ocean that you want to do. And we wouldn't be able to communicate with these assets without something like Starlink. You had Iridium before, but the bandwidth on that wasn't that strong. You have like other like kind of wine-out 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 Saronic. Sam, do you know Saronic?

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, 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, 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? What's the number?

Oh, I don't know, 500? What?

I—

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? 67, dude. I had more kids at my 3-year-old's birthday party. Like, that's insane to me. So we got 300 ships or whatever, and basically every ship is like, uh, I don't know the exact cost of it, but let me, let me pull this up. I think they're like, Will, correct me if I'm wrong, but like the average cost of these is something like, or maybe it's the average cost of these contracts, like $250 million every time you get contracted to do one of these. And so you're a startup like Saronic. 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 Anduril did was, was remarkable. So what Anduril 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 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 and 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, um, operations because they were making 10% on top of whatever the cost was, right? So the incentive model sort of screwed up. And that's how you get, you know, a single airplane that's like $1 billion or something like that to, to get made. And so it was costing the government a lot. These guys had no incentive to innovate, no incentive to cut costs, and they were using talent that was not the smartest engineering talent in the world, which was all centered in Silicon Valley. And then Anduril comes out, Paul Mollacki and, um, Trey and others, they basically came out and what they said was, uh, 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, um, 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.

Any—

that, that idea of let's go to Mars was there. It was available to all of us, and we were all blind to it. And so similarly, I think Anduril did that in the defense space. And now it looks like Saronic is basically doing that in the, um, the sort of ocean defense space where, um, 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 Hiluxes, 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 not want to cross 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 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. And there's, even just like you look at AI, the data infrastructure build-out for AI is going to be enormous. And basically that's going to require more data infrastructure, i.e., 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 more efficient.

So, well, let's go back. So there's already pipes under the ocean that basically, like internet pipes under the ocean, correct?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, most of the information that try— 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 those pipes in the ocean to do that?

So a lot of the initial infrastructure build out for 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 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 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, 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 is 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, 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, these are the sorts of businesses that like Ulysses, we want to be the servicing partner for in the future when they need maintenance, when they need inspections done, when it's us they're coming to and we're selling them an in-the-box solution to. I think the biggest opportunity in this paradigm in the future where more and more data cables are being laid subsea is actually in the protection of them. So I don't know if you guys are familiar what's going on in the Baltic Sea in places, but 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 a— it's like a human-sized tunnel, right?

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

If you're like to say cable, we're not talking like a, like a rope that you pull it. 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, 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 2 days later, Oh, cable cutter. I want to do it.

Dude, calling, calling this a cable cutter is like calling a robo a ship. You know what I mean? Like maybe technically it's, it's correct, but they need to rebrand this because what you're showing us is basically, uh, like a huge submarine, you know? Like I'm, I'm thinking like a clip. It's not scissors. Yeah. This is insane.

So they're going down and they're cutting this. And what does that do? Like, uh, does a country lose internet or is it just like, 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? What 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, you're talking to two dummies. How many cables does America rely on?

There's, 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. They're, they're very difficult to lay. right? Uh, and you need to respond quickly.

Uh, 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.

You need to be persistently out at sea, like sentry style, in the same way that like Andros, like, have the, you know, started with these like border, um, you know, 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, 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 subsurface. And fundamentally, that's the platform that we've developed. We have this surface vehicle with a docking system that can drop an underwater vehicle, and we've made it all but 10 times cheaper than anyone else. Seagrass is a nice place where we started.

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 that sea. So for the Baltic Sea part of it, it is 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 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. Then there was a bunch of like 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 and a few other things. I would have said, this is, 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?

Yeah, exactly. The boomers got cheap real estate, you guys got like B2B SaaS, 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 fundamentally 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 7 out of 10 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 Salesforce or not Salesforce, but like a Calendly 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, 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.

About technology windows. So he basically says, all right, there's a reason, there's a, there's a almost like a scientific reason why, 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, you know, 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, uh, GPS, uh, 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 you said, the low-hanging fruit all gets eaten. And so he, he went back all the way to the railroads, and he's like, the railroad technology window was open for 40 years. And like, if you just look, there was not another successful railroad company after that 40-year period, and, um, 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 they're in the technology window of AI, robotics, and 3D printing. And basically those 3 technologies have, 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 window looks like. Just check this out. If you're on, if you're on audio, you have to be on YouTube to see this, but I'm sharing my screen here. So it basically says like step 1, the technology is invented and only the hobbyists are playing with it out of interest and creativity. Right? And then 2 is the status moment. One of the hobbyists achieved status and wealth using the tech. So, you know, for example, so this is like, you know, Marc Andreessen on the, on the COVID 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, um, uh, with Elon and Palmer Luckey and all those guys right now. Who've, who've had their status moment where, you know, Palmer was like literally like living in an RV building VR headsets for like $90 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 OpenAI, uh, you know, OpenAI was a nonprofit. It was relatively obscure for the first 5 years that it was out, that they were doing their thing. But now Sam Altman and Elon and, and, 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 is, takes over due to their, their defensibility. Like they build something that is defensible. Maybe because it's hardware, maybe because it, it requires scale. Maybe it has a network effect and the technology window is 90% closed and you only have a few exceptions from there on out.

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 OceanTech?

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. I was, when this kind of scooter sharing startup thing popped off, I was working in that My co-founders all have 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 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 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 it because we came to it and we thought initially that we were gonna be maybe using someone else's platform and repurposing it. But we looked at all of the subsea drones on the market and they were crap. They cost like, 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 for a few days and just came back with a design for a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle. And then we tested it and we're 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, uh, all the great things— that's how all the biggest problems have been solved.

This is like, I mean, all religions, like Muhammad went into the cave, like Jesus went into the desert, you know, like all these like prophets, like they go off into the old and 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, Saint 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. So their first product, like their—

What do you mean by cultivated?

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

Like grown in a lab or grown where?

Yeah, exactly. In this 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 in the same way that Elon started off with a sports car, right, they're starting off with a It's 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 ideas. I mean, look, breweries are where so much of the best kind of 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. It's reducing pressure on fish stocks. This is good stuff. It doesn't have any of the nasty, parasites that you get in some of this like farmed salmon as well. Uh, so yeah, definitely. I think, I think things like this will be, would be important.

Holy shit, crazy to me.

This is crazy.

Is it, is it like the lab-grown meats where it's like $10,000 an ounce? It's like, it tastes— 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. Exactly.

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

Wow. These guys did a $100 million Series B in 2022.

That's pretty crazy.

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

Some crazy ones.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. All right. This one is, is wild, right? Buckle up.

Okay.

Ocean treasure hunting, right? So there is actually, uh, like, you know, hundreds of wrecks out there in the ocean today, uh, that potentially have like more than a billion dollars on them, right? Like gold bullions that like the Spanish were bringing back from their conquests and then they got hit by a storm or these sorts of things, right? And there's probably thousands that have 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 these kind of 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 we sell some of them, we get to, can we keep some? You can do this, right?

It's, it's like these models where it's like these, uh, SaaS negotiation companies are like, hey, if we go and save you money on your vendors, we get a cut, 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 what my friend used to do this, uh, his name's Chip Forsythe. 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, he went off the coast and just what, scuba dive?

Well, 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 sell it. 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 know, you know, negotiating, like, you know, looking through historical records to see like where we think it could be, you know, kind of scoping it out, and also getting permission so when you do the recovery you have like some chance of being able to hold on to 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 seabed and understand what's there. And then there's like recovery where you're bringing out these like gnarly, like JCB-style ROVs, remote operated vehicles that go down and just like dig it all up and bring it back up and you have your party.

That's it. 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 space that we may or may not be helping with.

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

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

Wow. Okay. That's insane. What else?

So there's, okay, I'll give you like a banger quote, right? There's this 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." What he meant by that is that you can actually alter the weather of the Earth by dunking iron into the ocean. So basically, 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 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 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 a certain ecosystem, which is maybe not good or something like that. Or there's basically When you're doing stuff with ecosystems, it's very difficult to predict how things are going to pan out. So you need to be careful. So this dude didn't do it that carefully. He went out off the coast of Vancouver, partnered up with these Native Americans, and just did this experiment where he just basically dumped off a load of iron filings, removed through his quantifications thousands of tons of carbon, And off the coast there that year, they had the biggest take of salmon ever as a result. But the kind of DSAO of Hardy's did not like his experimentation, and the Canadian equivalent of the CIA busted his home, and he got a warrant, and he got in a lot of trouble. So people haven't really done it since then because he was kind of first crazy, maybe like the first hobbyist to do something like this at scale. But I think there is going to be a billion-dollar company built in marine geoengineering of some description. I'm Catholic, so a lot of my beliefs around environmentalism and stuff like that comes from this Christian notion of stewardship that we should look after our lands and our seas because it's our duty to. And I think this is kind of where we're going with how we manage the climate. Climate used to be this kind of of let's avoid the worst-case scenario. And it was just very kind of like, let's stop emitting carbon. But I think there's a more interesting idea of this stewardship, I think, of environmentalism where we actually just control, we steward the planet, right? We take control, we get involved. Someone like Augustus at Rainmaker can make it rain when we want it to rain. Someone like Ulysses can come in and bring back the seagrasses when we need the seagrasses. Someone could, when we want to draw down carbon or increase fish stocks somewhere, we could just do a bit of this. I think we're going to have to build these tools because we need these in tandem with growing the size of the economic pie if we want to keep doing that. We don't want to just shut down the economy. We don't want to just stop doing emissions altogether. It's important for us to have these other compensatory mechanisms. And yeah, I think marine geoengineering is an interesting and underexplored 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 part right.

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

Incredible mullet. Yeah, dude.

Oh my God.

Wow.

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 going to take over the world and be billionaires or if you're going to go broke. but it's only gonna be one of the two. Do, 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, of Silicon Valley. And that's what's happening here.

For example, this guy, uh, uh, Augustus, I think his name is, he's on the COVID I think, of 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, 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 like, 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 like 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, it's like spiritually like aligned. It's like mentally they're, you know, we're smart and like we're like now, uh, like a strong group of people as well who are taking health and fitness seriously. And it's like Yes, 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 best, 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 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, uh, you extended that to, 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 that's —of the spirit is in technology now. It's like you have 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. Right 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 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 I am a fashion influencer officially now.

Uh, reply: mission accomplished. Um, 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.

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 Boston, the Boston Dynamics robot.

Well, uh, uh, one lot of last questions. Um, can I invest? Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay, cool. Cause 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, uh, 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. Uh, 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 8 out of 10 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, 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? 3 mullets. I need 97 more mullets and I'll give you a 10x return. Okay.

Give me the fund.

I'll find, I'll find the mullets for you.

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, I'm 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 gonna have to perform a miracle, right? And that's okay. The, 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, B2B HR 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 $1 million in our bank account 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, Shad.

I gotta ask you 2 quick questions. Number 1, seagrass seems so random. And if you started this company, you might have thought, oh, I'll do drones like for warfare. Yeah. 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?

Yeah, it was the initial idea. It was the initial idea. I came to one of my co-founders, He was on a surf trip and he kind of, the same ones who went into the cave and designed our AUV, went, heard about seagrass and went into a cave and like went deep on seagrass and came back to us and presented like, 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 working on the—

A guy out in the wave?

Yeah. Dude, this co-founder is absolutely carrying your company. Yeah. This guy built the tech and figured out the go-to-market.

I love it. Yeah, he's the, well, Yeah, he was the one who brought seagrass to us, and then myself and my other co-founders kind of put it together and like, this is what the business probably should look like. But then, yeah, we kind of went out from there into other areas. And 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 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 bring cash into your business is 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 gonna use that as a kind of launching point to do other interesting things in the ocean. Who do you admire, Will?

Who do you want to be like?

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. Do 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 Irwin family, uh, on the Ulysses train at some point.

Um, we gotta holler at Bindi. Bindi Irwin. That would be great. Robert is a fan. 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 right there. Oh, there it is. Thank you. Just look what I was pulling up because I love that clip. I'm with you, 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-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 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 This is how every man should be, by the way.

Like, you're passionate about something that's good for others, and like, his wife's just like eyeing him. And, uh, that's one of my favorite clips of all time.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's— and so I think the traits in him that I admire, just like, like raw passion. It's 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. Because you know what? I'm a podcaster and I'm going to 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? Like 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, 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 gotta run or whatever, you feel free, but I just gotta ask you about these. So, um, 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, well, I think it's like, you know, a lot of the traits of like conspiracy theorists are like those of like a great 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 is 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, 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 challenge our understanding of spacetime. I think it's very important to lean into these weird things and ask, "What if?" And yeah, I think conspiracy theories are just kind of fun as well. They're kind of like horoscopes for dudes. So they're like, if nothing else, they're just like, it's just like a fun thing to kind of spend your time reading about. On here, you talk about aliens.

We were with Joe Gebbia recently, who's like the 90th richest person in the world. And I was like, Joe, look, I was like, 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. And he went on a, he went on a big, uh, he had a big diatribe on his passion for, like, uh, you know, UFOs and aliens and how he absolutely, uh, is on board with them.

100% is on board with them.

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

And the funny thing is, if you meet Joe, he's, he's a 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, 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, 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 that I should go look at? A rabbit hole that would waste a nice 5 hours of my time?

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. I have, and I love it.

What's— 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 they've been convinced that their kids have been able to like read their mind. And now for like the first time with teaching kids how to spell on like iPads and also with like getting 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 Akil in the other room will hit the exact same 3 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, 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 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 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, 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, their son dies in an accident and they just know something's wrong. 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 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 and 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 and wild animals and savanna. 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 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 twins husband 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 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, uh, era of startups. Yeah, it's 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, uh, the girl— it was a bachelor party where the bachelors and the bachelorettes were both at doing it together basically as a, 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's 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, maybe 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 where are the less than $25 billion company founders? This is an interesting question that I think is still not really— there's no satisfying answers around. Previous generations had the Collisons pretty early. We had 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 Hewlett-Packard or Rainmaker or others to to get there. But, um, there is, um, 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, um, 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. 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— I came to explain my 5 desires or 6 desires. Can you just give it— give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at? 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, 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 t-shirt? This is like, we're near where I'm from. And he was like, he had like kind of 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. She 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 in— 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. 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 like maybe too far. Hey, you better watch it, Will.

That's our tema. You better watch what you're saying.

No, sorry, you're not that fat, Sam. So anyway, so that's why I can see where I can go wrong, right? But I did think there was an essence of truth in there where it's like maybe you should actually try to trim down things as little as possible. And I had this bizarre experience where I went and did Everest Base Camp afterwards and I was thinking a lot about 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 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, like just like on a break in the hike, this like 10-day hike up to a base camp. And I was like thinking through, it's like, okay, well, if you have no desire, like what do you do? It's like, oh, maybe you should have desire, but the minimum amount of them. Then I was like, what is like important to me? And I was like, on my hand, I was like, oh, my family, my friends, my health, my wealth, my craft. And I was like, oh shit, like that's like 5 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 briars and they go thorns and the flowers don't really grow. You have to like cut them back to let the energy go back to like the rose. And I was just like, I had this like very clear vision of like roses and I was like 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 5 important things to me, then it's like, okay, just like let it go, like stop desiring for it. Um, and I found that to be helpful. You got a girlfriend?

Uh, no.

That was your reaction to his story about the Buddhist monks and like realizing the meaning of life? You wanna—

dude, You telling me an Irish guy with that in his Tinder profile isn't just going to destroy the whole city? Give me a break.

Saving the world, uh, 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, what's your handle? @WillOBry. W-I-L-L-O-B-R-I.

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.