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

[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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  That episode was a whirlwind.

• 0:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we just recorded with our buddy Will O'Brien. This episode was like my favorite conversations living in San Francisco, where you run into a weirdo who knows a lot about something you know very little about, and you get way smarter, in like 45 minutes, your mind gets blown like five times and you just get smarter. So this is a get smarter episode for me.

• 0:19Sam Parr?

  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.

• 0:27Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 1:08Shaan Puri?

  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. Honestly, I'm never gonna do it. So I'll just put that up front. I'm never gonna do something like that. I think 99.9% of people listening to this will also never go do that thing.

• 1:52Shaan Puri?

  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 gonna 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?

• 2:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, I won't even go on a cruise ship. Like, like I was at a party the other day and the, the, uh, like wantliner 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.

• 2:29Sam Parr?

  So like I'm not even gonna be out there, but yeah, I agree with your premise.

• 2:34Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the framing is like, you know, something like this. It's like, you know, you know, everyone is like here standing on earth, like looking, 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 interplanetary, trying to put a base on the moon and take, you know, take the, take the dark side of the moon and then, you know, go 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, 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, what, where, where is everyone else going? And where is like underrated? And I suppose, you know, I grew up by, by the seaside and like the, in the, in the southwest of Ireland.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  I've always been obsessed with the ocean. If I wasn't like on it, in it or near it, growing up, there was something, something wrong in the same way that you're, you're afraid some of it. And yeah, I'm, I'm kind of like when I'm, when I'm away from it, I feel something wrong with me. So I've always been, been thinking about it. And I mean, if you just like, look at it in like, you know, fundamental terms, like the ocean economy right now is like already massive. It's not like, you know, the future space economy is going to be awesome. Like the, the ocean economy is massive. It's like three trillion dollars in like annual spend in different ways, right? It covers like 70% of the planet. Three billion people rely on it as their primary source of food. A billion is their, as their primary source of income. And then, you know, while we have like, you know, robots on Mars and, you know, these like low cost drones going in our skies,

• 4:11Speaker 02

  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, the kind of key core technology stack supporting like the, the key pillars of the ocean, whether it be transport, fisheries, defense, energy, you know, biodiversity, all these areas. It's just like, it's the same old like stack. Pregnant incumbents, large scale incumbents, offering solutions that, you know, are running on like ancient software. And there's just like very little innovation going on there. It's like, you know, you, you, you, you 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.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  It's like, you know it's right away. It's like, you ask them about aerospace. It's like, oh, boom. So yeah, this is like the kind of like the, the core of the thesis.

• 5:03Sam Parr?

  Sean, you just wound them up really easily. This is gonna be one of the, this is gonna be one of those podcasts that we've had, uh, we've only had maybe five of them ever, where at the end of the hour, we are like, we're no longer podcasting, we're getting into the ocean business.

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Sam Parr?

  Like.

• 5:22Shaan Puri?

  Aye, aye. Let's go. So Sam, he's just said a bunch of stats. So which of those surprised you? So I'm just gonna rattle a couple back. He said, all right, this one probably doesn't surprise you. Seventy percent of the earth, earth is covered in, in water. I think only 25% has ever been explored. He said, a billion people rely on, uh, the ocean for their primary source of income. Three billion is their diet? Explain that. What, what's the diet and the jobs one of the income one?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:58Sam Parr?

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

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, but in developed countries, it's not as you, you, we've developed logistics, which means you can go down the street and walk into some sushi bar and get like, you know, bluefin tuna probably flew in last night from Japan. However, if you are in, you know, Mogadishu or like Somalia or something like that, this might be a bit more difficult because the systems are not set up. So, and it's important to remember, most of the world does not live in, you know, you know, developed countries. So yeah, most, most humans just live along a coastline. Naturally then, easiest for source of food for them to get is fish.

• 6:31Sam Parr?

  All right. So what were some other stats, Sean, that caught your eye?

• 6:33Shaan Puri?

  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? Is that the, are those the big three? Or am I missing something big and obvious?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  The, the framing for me, how I think about like the ocean economy is like, you generally kind of break it up into like three categories, right? Like you have like the biosphere, right? Which is like your fisheries, it's your ecosystem 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 infrastructure, it's 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, uh, 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.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think one player that's like interesting in the online system space that's been around for, 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.

• 7:47Shaan Puri?

  What, what problem are they solving? What does Saildrone do?

• 7:49Speaker 02

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

• 8:00Sam Parr?

  They look amazing. They look awesome.

• 8:03Speaker 02

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

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Again, like a lot of these ocean founders that you see, they're very, very obsessed with the ocean. It's the very thing, uh, thing people very often get obsessed about and then try to make a business out of it.

• 8:55Sam Parr?

  What's your, what's your business do, Will? What's Ulysses, Ulysses or Ulysses?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Ulysses, yeah, yeah. Ulysses, uh, Ulysses were building a general purpose autonomy platform for, for maritime operations.

• 9:06Shaan Puri?

  Say that like we're stupid.

• 9:08Sam Parr?

  Just like, just pretend, pretend that we're stupid.

• 9:11Shaan Puri?

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

• 9:15Speaker 02

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

• 9:19Sam Parr?

  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?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  That, 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, 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, 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.

• 10:05Sam Parr?

  7% a year of this thing is going away.

• 10:08Shaan Puri?

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

• 10:12Speaker 02

  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 impacted. And basically, you know, the, the kind of context there is there's a lot of governments in around all over the world, like really, really panicking around this. Like if they lose their seagrasses, they lose their fish stocks. If they lose their fish stocks, you have the 1 billion people who rely on it and 3 billion people who rely on it for food. And, and the billion people, you know, they're, they're in a, they're in a tough situation. And basically restoring it, i.e. bringing it back, is currently a very manual process.

• 10:55Sam Parr?

  And how, and how are you guys doing that?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  But we built autonomous robots to do it.

• 10:59Sam Parr?

  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.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for this first use case, we've built, we've built a kind of custom robotic payload. You know, like when you're, when you're starting and trying to do something new, it's kind of important to, to kind of get, you know, initial traction in a weird place. And I think if we just build something and hope that people would use it for, for something, if we just build the platform, which is like an underwater vehicle and a surface vehicle that, that in, that dock together. You know, we might have trouble getting traction. But we started off with this initial use case. We've basically built these like attachments that go onto our under order 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 in in revenue, just kind of like, you know, first first year, five person team based here in San Francisco.

• 11:51Sam Parr?

  Why would someone pay you to do this?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  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, it'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 have contracted in Western Australia. We have a contract in Florida. We have a contract in Virginia and they're all kind of for like these general reasons, either compliance driven restoration or voluntary led restorations.

• 12:31Shaan Puri?

  Sam, I put, how important is seagrass into chat GPT? Here's what it 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.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  Well, what's crazy is you, okay, the mission check, like onboard, amazing.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  You kind of skipped the headline, Sean. Did we, he, he built a robotics business that in the first year, you've only, I think, I think you said you only raised $2 million or something like that. So with only $2 million in funding in your first 18 months of business, you did a million in revenue? Is that right?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just five people as well.

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  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 there's more talent? What's changed?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  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 sheet metal, sheet metal cut. And the cost of a lot of things has gone down massively as well, like with like the advent of like electric vehicles, batteries kind of went down massively and a lot of electronic components with drones. The motors went down massively in cost. 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.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  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 Iridium before, but like the bandwidth on that wasn't that strong. And so you have like other like kind of wind out features like that.

• 14:53Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:04Sam Parr?

  No, how do you spell it?

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  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 seeded this company, right? Yes.

• 15:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this looks sick as well.

• 15:15Shaan Puri?

  So like when we had Joe on the podcast and I was at his house, he was telling me about this company. Should have just invested on the spot, but he was basically like, we're, we're building drone, like drones for the water. And, you know, drones in the for defense, just like Andoril'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?

• 15:50Sam Parr?

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

• 15:55Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, 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.

• 16:01Sam Parr?

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

• 16:06Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 16:06Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 16:08Shaan Puri?

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

• 16:14Sam Parr?

  That's it?

• 16:15Shaan Puri?

  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 this. I think they're like, well, 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 Sironic, and you're, 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 remarkable. So what Anduril did was, in Silicon Valley, the smartest tech people,

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  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 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 operations, because they were making 10% on top of whatever the cost was, right? So the incentive model's sort of screwed up, and that's how you get, you know, a single airplane that's like a billion dollars

• 17:39Shaan Puri?

  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 then Anduril comes out, Paul Malachi 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 dollar 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.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  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 that 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 Anduril did that in the defense space. And now it looks like Sironic is basically doing that in the, um, the sort of ocean defense space.

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, like they're, they're building, um, I, I think of it like they're building the Humvees and we're building the Toyota Hiluxes, right? Like they're building like these like ultra fast, like defense focused, like vehicles. And like they're, you know, gonna make the South China Sea a hellscape and make China now want to cross that, um, that, that, that ocean and keep Taiwan safe if they keep going on the path they're doing. And they're doing like incredible job at that. Uh, and then we have, 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. Once we want it done, like on our platform. And so like, we want like all the servicing done by like Ulysses platforms and these sorts of things. There's like a lot of things that are making the ocean like very important in this century more than previous ones.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  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 it just even how we think about warfare is these 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 built out for AI is going to be like enormous, right? And basically that's going to require more data infrastructure, i.e.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:03Shaan Puri?

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

• 21:10Speaker 02

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

• 21:19Shaan Puri?

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

• 21:24Speaker 02

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

• 21:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like in the eighties, 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 a hundred million in revenue in a year. That was what they.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  Did they die or what happened?

• 21:49Sam Parr?

  A lot of them are still running and then there was a, some of the, you know, if you look at like, what are the biggest frauds on earth? Uh, like it's like Bernie Madoff. And then like the third one is actually one of these telecom companies that was laying pipes in, in the, in the ocean. But a lot of them are still around. They're just like small B to, they're not small, but they're B to B companies that you wouldn't even know, but they can be like a $10 billion a year company. But in the eighties, right? Well, or maybe, I don't know if you know this, but in the eighties, that was like the, the birth of a lot of this, wasn't it?

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, massively. And, and now you're seeing a transition to the build out being coming from Fang, from like big tech. Uh, and soon I think it'll be like the, the AI companies.

• 22:25Shaan Puri?

  So what you're saying, Will, now is that?

• 22:28Shaan Puri?

  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, ideally, they need to be close to places where people are using it. And what you're saying is that somebody's going to build a data center in the ocean, or people are already building data centers in the ocean. And what, who's doing that, or is this a future idea? And why are they doing that? Why is that a good idea?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  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, and they're building and operating, starting to building and operate these things.

• 23:07Shaan Puri?

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

• 23:11Speaker 02

  The plan is for it to be subsea. And again, like, these are the sorts of businesses that, like Ulysses, we want to be the kind of servicing partner for in the future. When they need maintenance, when they need like inspections done, when they like, it's like us they're coming to, and we're selling them like a kind of in the box solution to. I think the biggest opportunity in this, like, you know, paradigm in the future where more and more data cables are being laid subsea, is actually in the protection of them, right? So I don't know if you guys are familiar what's going on in like the Baltic Sea and places, but like, I think in the last year, about 11 cables have been cut by foreign actors. And like, you know, basically the kind of-

• 23:45Sam Parr?

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

• 23:50Shaan Puri?

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

• 23:53Sam Parr?

  Like, to say cable, we're not talking like, like a rope that you're pulling. It's like a, it's like a tunnel, right?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  And, and 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. 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 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 two days later, oh, cable cut.

• 24:37Sam Parr?

  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 thinking of like a clip.

• 24:53Shaan Puri?

  It's not scissors.

• 24:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Sam Parr?

  This is insane.

• 24:57Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  I mean, 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 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, in the Pacific, right?

• 25:42Sam Parr?

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

• 25:49Speaker 02

  There's, there's like, not actually that many, right? Like, as in like, there, there's like an insane amount of data that goes over them, but there's only about like 600 active.

• 25:58Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all. Like, they're, they're very difficult to lay, right?

• 26:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  You need to respond quickly. So yeah, like, I mean, there's like many critical things that rely on them, but like, yeah.

• 26:11Shaan Puri?

  You're, 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.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  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, the ocean is huge, so they need to be cheap to be scalable. You need to be able to see what's going on at the surface and you need to be able to see what's going on sub surface. And, and that fundamentally, that's like the platform that, 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, 10s cheaper than anyone else. So like, that's, you know, Seagrass is like a nice place where we started.

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

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

• 27:07Speaker 02

  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, our vehicle works in that sea. You know what? All that profiles in that sea. So for the Baltic Sea part of it, it is, it, it, it works. When you get into like narrower parts of the ocean, like some of the Pacific where you're getting down to like eight thousand 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, that can.

• 27:40Sam Parr?

  How old are you, Will?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  I'm twenty seven.

• 27:42Sam Parr?

  Sean, so when you and I moved to San Francisco and, well, I moved there in twelve and we're about the same age. It was the sharing economy. That was the thing. So it was Airbnb and Uber and Lyft were the winners. And then there was a bunch of derivative things like Airbnb for garages or, or, you know, or for storage. A few years later, it was AI or crypto. So like Bitcoin and Coinbase were winners. And then there was a bunch of like silly things. Right now, this is so strange to me. It's AI, but it's also, Will, it's whatever category you guys would go in. You're not quite defense tech, but it's like wild to me that this shift has happened because ten years ago, I would have told you, like, you know, that was when Boom Supersonic was starting and a few other things. I would 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?

• 28:28Sam Parr?

  It's to hear you say this. It's so foreign to me. It's also so interesting.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  We ate it.

• 28:43Sam Parr?

  Like, how many more CRMs are there?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. The boomers got cheaper to stay. You guys got like B two B 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 fundamentally hardware. And then like also, it's like, it's like a no brainer. You look at like the top ten most valuable countries, 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 more than sales for, but like a Calendly competitor. It's like, okay. Well, is there really a mode in like these sorts of things anymore?

• 29:19Sam Parr?

  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 would, if you were to talk about what you're talking about, it would have been like you're you're so out of touch. You're out of touch for the for the for the Y C group of out of touch people. Like it's just so interesting to me and I think it's great.

• 29:47Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 29:54Sam Parr?

  No.

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

  A 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, 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.

• 30:37Shaan Puri?

  And basically, like you 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 like, 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

• 31:22Shaan Puri?

  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 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 window looks like. So just check this out. If you're on, if you're on audio, you have to be on YouTube to see this, but I'm 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 achieved status and wealth using the tech. So, you know, for

• 32:06Shaan Puri?

  example, so this is like, you know, Marc Andreessen on the, 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, 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 OpenAI, you know, OpenAI was a nonprofit.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  It was relatively obscure for the first five years that it was out that they were doing their thing. But now Sam Altman and Elon and Palmer again with Andro 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, 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 closed, is 90% closed, and you'll only have a few exceptions from there on out.

• 33:32Sam Parr?

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

• 33:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Will, when did you start? Were you like, were you a hobbyist? And when did you start with doing what doing what you're doing? Like, when were you messing around with drones or ocean tech?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I mean, like, like I said, I've been like, you know, in the ocean, on the ocean, near the ocean since I was a kid diving and surfing. You know, whatever, wakeboarding, 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, and these sorts of things. But again, none of us had ever actually really done anything in the ocean, which I actually think is a massive benefit. Right? Like, because none of us came in with these preconceived notions for how like subsea drones should work. You know, my, you know, two of my co-founders were building aerial drones in a drone delivery startup before.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  So they took like a lot of the primitives from that. One of them had worked on self-driving cars, took some of the like ideas from that. But again, I think there's like definitely this like idea that I agree with that, like, you know, to really actually shake up an industry. It's probably good if you don't come from it because we came to it and like, you know, we, we thought initially that we were going to be maybe using someone else's platform and repurposing it. But we looked at all of the subsea drones on the market and they were crap. They cost like, you know, they were like, one of the ones we were looking at, which like actually had the specs that would have meant what we wanted to do, cost like 500 grand. That's like a quarter of our pre-seed to do what we want. Like, it's like, and then like my, my, our CTO, Jamie.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  He just like went into a cave for a few days and just like came back with like a, a design for like a new type of like autonomous underwater 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 artist to go into a cave and then you can, you can like change things.

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  That's how all the great things, that's how all the biggest problems have been solved.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  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, and yeah, that does work. Yes.

• 35:57Shaan Puri?

  You said something 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?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, my friend's got a very, very interesting startup called Wild Type, which is like sustainable sushi grade salmon. So basically that's like cultivated seafood. And so their first product like they're.

• 36:27Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean by cultivated?

• 36:29Speaker 02

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

• 36:33Shaan Puri?

  Like grown in a lab or grown?

• 36:34Speaker 02

  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? They're starting off with like a sashimi grade salmon, the highest end salmon to get. And I've tried it, it's great.

• 36:56Shaan Puri?

  This is in San Francisco? It looks like a brewery.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. It's like 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.

• 37:17Sam Parr?

  So you're telling me that someone is growing salmon that I can go eat right now?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I got it through my friend. I don't know if they're in stores yet. And they're still going, undergoing FDA approval. But like, yeah, no, none of these nasty heavy metals or microplastics in them. You know, it's reducing pressure on fish stocks. You know, this is, this is good stuff. It doesn't have any of the nasty like parasites that you get in some of this like farmed salmon as well. So, yeah, definitely, I think, think the things like this will be, will be important.

• 37:54Sam Parr?

  Holy shit.

• 37:55Shaan Puri?

  Crazy to me.

• 37:56Sam Parr?

  This is crazy.

• 37:57Shaan Puri?

  Is it, is it like the lab grown meats where it's like $10,000 an ounce? It's like, we can, we made, you either pick, you either have the cheap thing like Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods, but it doesn't taste great or it's not good for you. It's made with a bunch of chemicals or you have the real thing, but it's super expensive and so nobody can afford it.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Well, I think even that, like my friend shared it with me that it's not that expensive, but it's.

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  You're not that good of friends.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  No, exactly. Yeah, are you? But I think this stuff is like sooner than we think. It's around the corners.

• 38:30Shaan Puri?

  Wow, these guys did $100 million Series B in 2022. That's pretty crazy.

• 38:34Sam Parr?

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

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Some crazy ones.

• 38:43Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 38:44Speaker 02

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

• 39:27Speaker 02

  But, you know, we sell some of them, we get to, we get, can we, can we keep some? You can do this, right?

• 39:32Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 39:40Sam Parr?

  We get a cut.

• 39:40Shaan Puri?

  We keep 20%. It's that, except for you go to the Spanish royal government and you're like, hey, there's, if we find any hidden treasures in the ocean, can we keep a couple of bars for our sale?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. Ram for piracy. Who's building this?

• 39:53Sam Parr?

  So what, my, my friend used to do this. Uh, his name's Chip Forsyth, uh, and he would be like, hey, I'm going off the coast of whatever to go.

• 40:00Shaan Puri?

  Bro, you did not have a friend that used to do this. That's insane.

• 40:03Sam Parr?

  Chip Forsyth, you know, um.

• 40:04Shaan Puri?

  He went, he went off the coast and just what scuba dive for? What was he doing?

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  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 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?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Pretty much, yeah, yeah. So there's like fundamentally two parts of like a mission. It's like, or three parts is like, 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 like some chance of being able to hold on to it. Then there's like this kind of scouting where you're actually on site and you're doing like scouting and you're like basically using sonar to scan the seabed and understand what's there. And then there's like recovery where you're bringing out these like gnarly like J C B style ROVs and remote operated vehicles that go down and just like dig it all up and bring it back up and and you have your party.

• 41:14Shaan Puri?

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

• 41:20Speaker 02

  I know some people working on this that haven't like really shared their plans publicly yet. So I won't like share, but there is like some exciting developments coming in this space that that we we may or may not be helping with.

• 41:29Shaan Puri?

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

• 41:34Speaker 02

  So I'm, 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.

• 41:44Sam Parr?

  Wow, okay, that's insane. What else?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  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 of yours. 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 could actually alter like the kind of weather of the earth by like dunking iron into the ocean, right? So so basically like many, many parts of the, the ocean are low in iron. They're, 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?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  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, you know, a certain like ecosystem, which is maybe like not good or something. Or, you know, there's a basically where you're doing stuff in, in, in like with ecosystems, there It's very like difficult to predict how things are going to pan out. You need to be careful. So this dude didn't, wasn't, didn't 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 qualifications, like thousands of tons of, of, of, of carbon.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  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 DSA authorities did not like his experimentation and like the Canadians, Canadians, 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. Cause 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, I'm, 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.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  And I think this is like, kind of like where we're going with like how we, we manage the climate. Like climate used to be this kind of, let's like avoid the worst case scenario. And it was just very like, kind of like, let's like stop emitting carbon. But like, I think there's like a more interesting idea of like this like stewardship, I think of environmentalism where we actually just like control. You know, we, we, we steward the planet, right? We like, we take control, we get involved. We, you know, someone like Augustus at Rainmaker can make it rain when we want it to rain. You know, someone like USIs can come in and bring back the, 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 stocks somewhere. We could just like do a bit of this. I think it's gonna, we're gonna have to build these tools, right?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  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 underexplored space. I think many 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.

• 45:12Sam Parr?

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

• 45:18Shaan Puri?

  Incredible mullet. Oh my god. Wow.

• 45:20Sam Parr?

  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 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 gonna take over the world and be billionaires, or if you're gonna go broke, but it's only gonna be one of the two. 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 I-

• 46:04Shaan Puri?

  Austin and San Francisco had a baby. You get the, the stash and the mullet of Austin, and then you get the insane ambition and tech, tech chops of Silicon Valley. And that's what's happening here.

• 46:15Sam Parr?

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

• 46:33Speaker 02

  I think it's emblematic of like, um, of kind of the evolution of the technology industry, though. I think like, you know, we, we began like as this kind of like hippies that found computers with people like Steve Jobs. We were like actualizing on like the axis of like the spiritual, uh, you know, realm. And then it was like, you know, you had like people like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg who were just like nerds, like actualizing on the sense of like mind. You know, they were like smart and nerdy. And now you have like people who are like openly flexing on like, we're actualizing on the sense of the body, right? Like, we're like becoming strong. And like, you have like this like full integration of like mind, body, and spirit. And it's like, no wonder that this like 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 like Elon, who is like chief tech bro in the fucking White House, right? Like, these things, this is like

• 47:17Speaker 02

  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, like, this is why I think like, we're at like the most interesting time in technology right now.

• 47:41Shaan Puri?

  I like that poetic. You know, last night I watched a clip of the final scene of Ratatouille. You seen that, Sam?

• 47:48Sam Parr?

  No.

• 47:49Shaan Puri?

  It's a great movie and the final scene of Ratatouille is the critic, the critic who's the most fearsome critic in all of the town, writes the review about the restaurant where the rat has been cooking. And he's just gives this beautiful monologue, maybe the best, maybe the most beautiful four minutes in all of film is the last four minutes of Ratatouille here, the monologue. Will, I think you're up there with the last four minutes of Ratatouille there with your mind, body and spirit analogy for tech. I think that's kind of amazing. I've actually heard that before with just the technology part of it. So it's like you had the initial, you know, the bicycle for the mind. So you had Steve Jobs talking about how the, how computers will enable creativity.

• 48:30Shaan Puri?

  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, you extended that to, you know, the entrepreneurial will has, has grown in that way.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Look at Bezos and Zuckerberg, they're getting jacked, like they're doing TRT, they look like, look, like this is like, I think that's true. 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 Jordy and John are doing there. It's like, they're like, they're, you know, the, the technology brothers, they're like leaning into the fact that they're like tech bros. That used to be a slur, right? Now it's like, oh, I'm confident in it. I'm like, I'm owning it. And they're like doing these like hilarious promo videos of them like sipping Dom Perignon, like it's like, there's like a confidence and an air of like, okay, let's do it now. You know, we're not like, we're not going to be like at like the events and functions anymore, kind of lying about what we're doing.

• 49:29Shaan Puri?

  Not neutered.

• 49:30Sam Parr?

  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, 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 all birds to denim shirts, cowboy boots. And like, when I saw this and he said tech bro, I was like,

• 50:01Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's amazing.

• 50:02Sam Parr?

  I was like, I don't think I could talk, like this is not going to be.

• 50:05Shaan Puri?

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

• 50:08Sam Parr?

  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. No.

• 50:18Shaan Puri?

  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 and like jumping around and like doing backflips and shit? Like, there's no difference between the two videos. That's the same video to me.

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  It's one of those days that everyone remembers where they were when they saw it.

• 50:46Shaan Puri?

  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 Boston Dynamics robot.

• 50:53Sam Parr?

  Well, one last questions. Can I invest?

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, great. Okay, cool. Cause I think this is awesome. I, you guys are, you guys are insane, man. This energy is so wild. I'm not convinced that it's gonna end one like, okay, so on one hand, it goes both ways. So on one hand, there's the hubris where, you know, you're like a, you know, in the case of 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.

• 51:26Shaan Puri?

  It would be better if they called him Parker. More condescending.

• 51:29Sam Parr?

  Little Parker.

• 51:30Shaan Puri?

  Listen, Parker.

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  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 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 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

• 52:00Sam Parr?

  is this the 10% of the time where you guys are just gonna take over the world? Or is this another time where someone's gonna be like, look, this is exactly what you told you. It does not work.

• 52:08Shaan Puri?

  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 the mullet, right? Three mullets. I need 97 more mullets and I'll give you a 10x return.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Okay, give me the fund, I'll find the mullet for you.

• 52:33Shaan Puri?

  You find the mullet.

• 52:35Sam Parr?

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

• 52:39Shaan Puri?

  I definitely understand that feeling, yeah, for sure. 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 important thing is, oh wow, we took a portion of our brain power that was otherwise gonna be building X or working at Y company, you know, working at Facebook optimizing, you know, ad clicks or starting a company that was gonna be doing, you know, B2B, HR, whatever, software. And instead, now we peeled off a portion of that talent and now we sent, you know, 100 mullets at these problems.

• 53:24Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Well, I can assure 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, Sean.

• 53:45Shaan Puri?

  I gotta ask you two quick questions. Number one, Seagrass seems so random. And if you started this company, you might have thought, 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?

• 54:00Speaker 02

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

• 54:14Shaan Puri?

  He heard about Seagrass on a surf trip? From who?

• 54:17Speaker 02

  A marine biologist friend of his who was working.

• 54:19Sam Parr?

  It's a guy out, a guy out in the wave.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:23Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this co-founder is absolutely carrying your company.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:28Shaan Puri?

  This guy has built the tech and figured out to go to market. I love it.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's the, well, yeah, he found, he found the kind of, he was the one who brought Seagrass to us. And then myself and my other co-founders kind of put it together. We're 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 you can, it's a pretty big market. You can, you'll bring cash into your businesses 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, 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.

• 55:13Sam Parr?

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

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Steve Irwin, probably.

• 55:20Sam Parr?

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

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Not right now, but we have a picture of him up on the wall here.

• 55:33Sam Parr?

  Oh, you scream Steve Irwin. You have Steve Irwin vibes through and through.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I know. He's, yeah, I'm hopeful I can get the Irwin family on the Ulysses train at some point.

• 55:46Sam Parr?

  We gotta, we gotta holler at Bindy. Bindy Irwin.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  That would be great. Robert as well.

• 55:51Sam Parr?

  I love those guys.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, Robert as well. Yeah, you know, look, Steve, I think is like, and it's so funny. People say Steve on a podcast in the tech. It's like Steve Jobs. It's like for me, it's.

• 56:03Shaan Puri?

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

• 56:07Sam Parr?

  Dude, Sean, Sean, there's this famous video. I know you've seen this, Will. There's this 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.

• 56:21Shaan Puri?

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

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  There it is. Thank you.

• 56:27Shaan Puri?

  Just look what I was pulling up because.

• 56:28Sam Parr?

  I love that clip.

• 56:29Shaan Puri?

  I am with you, brother. I love this clip.

• 56:31Sam Parr?

  I love this clip.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Play it, play it. What good is a fast car, a flash house and a gold-plated Dunney to me? Absolutely no good at all. I've been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is gonna help humanity. I wanna have the purest oceans, I wanna be able to drink water straight out of that creek, I wanna stop the ozone layer, I wanna save the world. And you know, money? Money's great. I can't get enough money. And you know what I'm gonna do with it? I'm gonna buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what, Charles? I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate. I'll use it and I'll spend it on buying land.

• 57:08Sam Parr?

  This is how every man should be, by the way. Like, you're passionate about something that's good for others. And like, his wife's just like eyeing him. And, uh, that's one of my favorite clips of all time.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, and so I think the traits in him that I admire is just like, just like raw passion. It's like, just like unbridled passion. It's like, this is like nonsensical passion. It's like...

• 57:26Shaan Puri?

  You think I'm gonna have a conversation without a microphone? No, I'm gonna put a microphone there. I'm gonna record a podcast. I'm gonna record a podcast every day. And I don't give a rip who's listening. Cause you know what? I'm a podcaster. And I'm gonna podcast my ass off.

• 57:38Sam Parr?

  It's a whole lot more lame, but you're not talking about like saving the earth. You know what I mean?

• 57:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I tried, I tried.

• 57:44Sam Parr?

  Like when we're talking about like conversion rate optimization or, uh, B2B. Dude, in fact, Will, we kinda, my generation and the generation before me, we, we, you know, what do they say? Uh, uh, hard times create, or no, uh, like we need a hard man 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.

• 58:10Shaan Puri?

  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 gotta run or whatever, feel free, but I just gotta ask you about these. So, I wanna do the fun one and then the spiritual one. The fun one is conspiracy theories. You're a big conspiracy, you're a fan of conspiracy theories, I believe. And you like people who like conspiracy theories. So can you just give me a rant on why conspiracy theories are underrated here?

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I think, um, but I think it's like, uh, you know, a lot of the traits of like a conspiracy theorist are like those of like, uh, like a great, like, uh... I think like someone that like believes in something that everyone else tells them is like not real. Um, or like, you know, that they shouldn't believe in, or like, you know, people that are like able to see patterns that others can't see. And, you know, they they just like go down these like rabbit holes. Uh, and 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 uh an ability to see the world differently, I think.

• 59:09Shaan Puri?

  I I 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.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  I just think it's very important to, you know, how weird ideas and take them seriously, right? Like if we just had heard the sea grass idea and just like rubbish it, you know, we wouldn't, I would like, I don't know what the hell I'd be doing today, you know? It's like, you need to take something weird and go with it. And so like, I don't believe like to blindly believe every report of telepathy and nonverbal autistic children, every like late night UFO sighting. But like, I refuse to dismiss them outright. And I think, you know, history shows us that breakthroughs often happen at the edges where people are curious enough or foolhardy enough to investigate the unexplainable. So it's like, whether it's like Christian mystics, you know, 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, um, what if?

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  And yeah, I think conspiracy theories are just kind of like fun as well. They're like, kind of like horoscopes for dudes. So they're like, if any, if not, if nothing else, like they're just like, it's like, uh, it's just like a fun thing to kind of like spend your, your, your time reading about.

• 1:00:14Sam Parr?

  On here, you talk about aliens. We are with Joe Gebbia recently, who's like the 90th richest person in the world. And I was like, Joe, look, you're worth like $10 billion. Like if there's a 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 is on board with them.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  100%.

• 1:00:44Shaan Puri?

  Is on board with them?

• 1:00:47Sam Parr?

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

• 1:00:50Shaan Puri?

  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, 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?

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  If, if, if your readers want to go down this rabbit hole, the best website I recommend going is a website a friend of mine runs. UAP evidence.com.

• 1:01:22Shaan Puri?

  Is there any other dope conspiracy, uh, that I should go look at a rabbit hole that would waste a nice five hours of my time?

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Uh, I think the last of a conspiracy, more like wacky, weird rabbit hole you need to go down is you need to listen to the telepathy tapes podcast.

• 1:01:38Shaan Puri?

  I have, and I love it.

• 1:01:39Sam Parr?

  What's, uh, what, what is this? Is this like, I can read your mind?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  So basically there's this group of people that people have been calling crazy for like the last like two decades, right? It's basically the teachers and parents of children with 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 three numbers. 100% of the time consistently in tests.

• 1:02:19Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. Yes.

• 1:02:21Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 1:02:35Sam Parr?

  And she turned?

• 1:02:36Shaan Puri?

  I, I didn't finish the whole thing. I, I listened to probably the first two or three, but I was listening to it 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? But by the way, Will, did you walk away from that? You know, half convinced, three fourths convinced, totally convinced. What did you walk away?

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  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, 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, telepathy and stuff. And there's like this world of parapsychology, which is like the study of these kind of sigh phenomena.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  There's like a few very reproducible experiments in it, like the Gansfeldt experiment, which if you allow me to go on this like very short rabbit hole, but like the most reproducible experiment in this field is basically you take two people, you put them in like two separate rooms. These could be twins, these could be husband, wife, they could be two artists, they could be two people who don't know each other, different settings. And basically you give me a picture and you give, and you're the receiver then in another room. And I'm in one room and I'm talking about this random picture I've been given. Let's say it's one in four different pictures. I get a picture of an elephant. For five minutes, I talk about elephants, I saturate my brain with Africa and wild animals and 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 five minutes, I've, I stop and you get

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  replayed what you were saying to yourself for five minutes and you get the four random images and you get to pick one of the four. And then you would assume if complete chance, you know, you would 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 prone 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

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:16Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm so bummed that I grew up in the B2B era of startups.

• 1:05:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so bummed. Well, I wish, like, I wish I was 10 years younger. You were 10. I wish we could have hung out. Dude, let's grab some beers.

• 1:05:30Shaan Puri?

  I went to a bachelor party this weekend and everybody on the, 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 almost looks like a pencil sketch?

• 1:05:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Shaan Puri?

  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, 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.

• 1:06:22Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. That is so funny.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  I think one like universal law about technology is that like it breeds variants, 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. 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 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,

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  where are the, you know, the, the kind of like less than kind of 25, you know, uh, 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 Colson'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 U.S. Season or Rainmaker or others to like, to, to, to get there. But there is definitely like a, I think a bigger skew in both the ideas that young people are interested in today. Uh, I think that's like broadly just like downstream of, um, yeah, technology.

• 1:07:38Sam Parr?

  Are you going to become an American?

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I think I'm gonna get, I'm on the green carriage path. Yeah.

• 1:07:44Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 1:07:58Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, I just, um, kind of want, I just had heard that you, you can 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 the, uh, Kamandu, 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. Cause.

• 1:08:44Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  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, kind of like an Irish accent. He's like, oh, well, you know, I actually work with an Irish guy. Um, he has like an orphanage and like a charity out here. And I was like, oh wait, like what's this like Irish guy's name? His, the Irish guy he named was like the one Irish guy that my, my neighbor who's like my mom's friend, my mom's friend was like, my mom was worried about me going to Nepal. She's like, well, you know, and 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 was in Nepal who had a charity out there.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:43Sam Parr?

  Everyone just talking like kind of like all these monks are like. Little, I boxed the.

• 1:09:47Shaan Puri?

  They're like, you'll do nothing.

• 1:09:48Sam Parr?

  I boxed the bullocks off them. Yeah.

• 1:09:51Shaan Puri?

  You'll do nothing, literally.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  There's Irish people everywhere. We have, we have, we have people everywhere. That's like the kind of moral.

• 1:09:56Sam Parr?

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

• 1:10:02Shaan Puri?

  All right. So, so sorry. So you go there and you're, uh, continue.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm curious about the religion. I'm asking the 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. Be unhappy until you have that thing. And I'm just like, dude, I'm very like American dream pilled. I'm like, you know, I should want for things, I should want for things. But I can see how that can go wrong as well, right? Cause that leads to like, you know, keeping up with the Joneses type lifestyle. 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, uh, maybe like too far.

• 1:10:40Sam Parr?

  Hey, you better watch it, Will.

• 1:10:44Shaan Puri?

  That's our demo.

• 1:10:45Sam Parr?

  You better watch what you're saying.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  No, you're not that fat, son.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  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 things as little as possible. And I had this like bizarre experience where I was, I was, I went and did Everest Base 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 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 somehow. 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, uh, I like, it was like thinking through, it's like, hey, well, if you have no desire, like what do you do?

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, maybe you should have desire, but the minimum amount of them. And 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. And the rose bushes, if you like, leave them go unkept, they basically just grow like rires 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. Um, and I found that to be helpful.

• 1:12:22Sam Parr?

  You had a girlfriend?

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 1:12:26Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:12:31Sam Parr?

  You wanna, dude, you tell me an Irish guy with that in his center profile isn't just gonna destroy the whole city? Give me a break.

• 1:12:41Shaan Puri?

  Saving the world, uh, saving the world's seagrass, former monk, Sam's five desires. Family, health, wealth, fitness, and will.

• 1:12:51Sam Parr?

  And will.

• 1:12:52Shaan Puri?

  Those are Sam's five desires.

• 1:12:56Sam Parr?

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

• 1:12:57Shaan Puri?

  Well, this is awesome. People should check you out. Where on Twitter? You're Will O'Brien. What's your, what's your handle?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  At Will O'Brien. W I L O B R I.

• 1:13:06Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Thank you, dude.

• 1:13:09Sam Parr?

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