The company building underwater drones for $50,000

Will O'Brien, founder and CEO of Ulysses, joins John and Chris Sacca for a pint to discuss how underwater autonomous robots are scaling up to solve critical ocean challenges. They cover the technical history of Guinness (including the math breakthrough that created Student's t-test), why seagrass is an overlooked super-sequester of carbon, and the engineering required to operate robots thousands of meters beneath the surface. Will also breaks down Ulysses' vertical integration strategy, the reality of eco-pragmatism versus "green tape," and what it takes to sell hard tech to defense and offshore energy sectors. Timestamps (00:00:30) R&D at Guinness (00:05:43) Planting seagrass with robots (00:16:53) Lowering the cost of doing things in the ocean (00:19:00) Landing in a Chinese prison (00:27:53) Building robots to withstand saltwater (00:31:08) Live use cases for underwater robots (00:46:03) The undersea cable vulnerability Resources: Guinness Quality Standards: https://www.guinnesscelebrate.com/our-quality/quality-standards No Great Stagnation in Guinness by Will O’Brien: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guinness

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. We need to do millions of water drones.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Saltwater in the ocean is a very hostile environment. That's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean. Will O'Brien is the co-founder and president of Ulysses. The company started doing seagrass restoration and is now expanding into everything from mapping the seabed to keeping ports secure. O'Brien's larger ambition is to make ocean operations so cheap and routine to support entirely new industries.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Before we get to Ulysses, we have a lot to talk about, but just getting to Ireland's most innovative company. Just explain the technical innovations for Chris.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  The Guinness Company, a great example of a business. Its growth largely derived from technical innovations. And you don't think of it, you think of just like a pint of Guinness. But the truth is, they were starting an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. And a research and development team where you would just hire extremely smart people and just say, "Come in here and find a problem and work on."

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Wait, they had Xerox PARC in Guinness?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  They did, as early as the 1890s.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  And it was undirected research?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, just do what you want. So, and there's many technical innovations that come from it. For example, anyone who's, I studied math in college and one of the tests from that is the students' t-test. This is a, how do you derive either the standard deviation if you know the mean or the mean if you know the standard deviation from a small sample, less than 30. This was a problem in Guinness because to, you know, one of the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness is the amount of lipids or fats in hops. So they were having to take up like hundreds of hops to see, you know, is this a high, is this a high-quality batch or not? And they were losing a few percent per batch. And that means a lot when you're in the high-volume, low-margin food and beverage industry.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  So William C. Lee Gossett had to publish under a pseudonym, the student. He couldn't let, he couldn't publish his research that he was doing with Fisher, famously, another famous statistician of the time, about 1920s. And he published in the first journal of Mathematica, which is now, you know, a very famous mathematics journal. This innovation, this breakthrough he found of how to do like small sample statistics. But he had to publish, and that's why it's called the students' t-test still to this day, because they didn't want Anheuser-Busch or Heineken or other people to know that they were hiring these researchers to like solve problems for them.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Oh, to not associate the advanced with Guinness?

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Exactly, because they didn't want their competitors to know.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  So they're getting better margins, so loads of innovation. There was a project, Project Acorns. Acorns standing for Advanced Cans of Rich Nectar, which was the, basically, how do we put can, how do we make a Guinness at-home version? It was the 80s, people were starting to drink less and drink more at home. The price of a pint was going from a pound to a pound fifty, people were up in arms. So they're drinking at home. So they're like, "How do we do these things at homes?" Initially, the project was called Project Dynamite, but as you'd imagine in the 1980s, shipping parcels with the word "dynamite" on it between London and Dublin would have caused them some concern.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  They got confused all the other parcels.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they stopped labeling the project, you know, Project Acorn, and they developed the widget. And the widget was voted above, did you know it was voted above the internet in the 1990s top 100 inventions of the 20th century? Marketing is another place where Guinness was really, you know, the Guinness-

• 3:20Speaker 01

  The Nigeria thing.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Nigeria, the movie, the film industry in Nigeria.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  They produced like the James Bond of Nigeria, and that's why, like, people know Guinness is very popular in Nigeria, it's one of the top markets. But it's because they just like made a movie where, well, I guess-

• 3:33Speaker 00

  It's the top market, actually.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, yeah. It was like Guinness, the top, was a part of the movie or something?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. But the marketing, I think, is really one of the areas where Guinness was most standout. I think Guinness is good for you as this iconic campaign. And the toucan, there's one up there.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  The toucan as well, the iconic Guinness toucan bird. And they've won like more Cannes Lion advertising awards than nearly any other company.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  I have the Guinness Quality Standards on my phone.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Why do you know all this stuff?

• 4:02Speaker 00

  I'm just curious.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I'm just like very passionate about the- No, but did you start it as because you're an entrepreneur and a founder and you're looking for examples of innovation and there happened to be one in your backyard? Or is it-

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  You studied as much in the pubs as I did and-

• 4:15Speaker 00

  I think it was both, I think it was both. I think it was like, this is a, I felt like it was, I just, I just thought it was, it's a very underrated company. These are the seven Cs of Guinness Quality Standards. So this is like a PDF that I have-

• 4:31Speaker 01

  This is a PDF that they make for bars or something?

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. They have the seven, okay, the quality standards, right? Crafted presentation, consistent, freshness, counter-visibility, correct gas, correct temperature, clean lines, clean glassware. So they're the things you need. I'll send this to you, John.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  A good system, yeah, yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  That's all life advice, honestly.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Keep clean lines, wear your going places. I think for me, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's an entrepreneur, my mom had her own business. Both my grandads, you know, won around a pub, then one was a farmer and had a few other businesses. And a very classic Irish story. But I always grew up in a world of commerce and business. And my mom has like, and dad have siblings and none of them, none of the men anyway, at least, or the Murphys, O'Briens work for anybody else, they're all like, they're all like entrepreneurial, disagreeable. So I grew up in a household that business was the talk of the table, like, it was revered. So I've just always been appreciators of good businesses. And it was so cool to meet a bit, I've always revered technology and revered companies like Stripe and others and like, whatever. But like, to see one that's like, you know, homegrown like this and, but that I don't think anybody really talks about

• 5:38Speaker 00

  was really like cool and exciting.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  So speaking of entrepreneurship, I want to get to, we do have to at some point get to Ulysses. But do you need another Guinness? I will note that it's 20 minutes in and just the lying Irish shirt. You can pour these ones, see how you do.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely, all right. And- Thanks, Chris. Wow, value add, what a value add investor.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  You guys get started talking about this company. I'm only here for one reason.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, what does Ulysses actually do?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  We build robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in our oceans. That's the simple one-liner. I think, you know, we started the company three years ago under this kind of general observation that, it was very clear three years ago that autonomous systems, robotics were going to do an increasing share of the world's GDP, increasing share of the kind of critical work. And myself and my co-founders were looking at potential divines to deploy robotic systems. And, you know, after kind of a cursory look at air, land, sea, sea became very interesting. And then, you know, looking at, you know, you know, surface, undersea, undersea became very, very interesting. And we could quickly identify a lot of very interesting jobs

• 6:51Speaker 00

  that frankly were not being done underwater, or not being done on a scale, or were not formidable enough to do. So the idea for building underwater robots kind of came from that.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  You started with seagrass, right? Maybe just why you started with seagrass and how you ended up pivoting to the robots?

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yes, so, you know, the first, I mean, the first, when we, when we started looking at, again, tasks that robots could do. One that captivated us initially was just like, this kind of, there's a whole spectrum of ocean conservation-related tasks. One of my co-founders was on, he was on a surf trip. He met a marine biologist and she described her job. And her job was, was, you know, taking photos underwater. It was planting seeds, it was, you know, gathering water samples, all these like super manual tasks. And he'd been building like aerial drones for food delivery with Mada and was like, "Yeah, surely you could build like an underwater equivalent of like one of these aerial drones, you need to do these sorts of tasks." So that's kind of what led us-

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And what were the tasks?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  The task initially was the kind of full spectrum of ecosystem restoration, which was map the seabed, understand what's down there, then collect the seeds wherever their seeds are. We were looking at flowering plants at the time, sea grasses.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Then, and then take them and then plant them in areas that need to be restored.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And what caused the sea-

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Really, really quick, I have to say, I used your one-pull method.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And I, I hate to concede, there's no appreciable difference between pints, but yeah. Nothing sacred anymore.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  No, no, no. Yeah, it's so the ceremony.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  This is the one shot.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  The one-shot.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like, what's going on in the oceans?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  So, a few reasons. If you take kind of current projections for maybe how fish stocks are going to do, kind of in and around the 2040s,

• 8:46Speaker 00

  many of the kind of critical fish stocks in the ocean could just be totally wiped out. Basically, the population curves are not really looking good for many fish species. It's like billions of people rely on it as their primary source of protein or income every day.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Overfishing in general.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Overfishing, yeah. And a big driver as well is also habitat loss. You have a lot of factors driving it and basically the rate at which we restore these ecosystems is, you know, hundreds of thousands of times less the rate we lose them.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's important to restore the seagrass.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And we've lost a lot of it. And you started with that as part of the need to restore the seagrass. You ended up making an underwater robot.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Which is how you got into underwater robot space?

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. I mean, you know, yeah, we start solving the seagrass problem. But very quickly into solving that problem, like we was like very clear, wow, there's a lot of other similarly shaped problems in the ocean, you know. From first, so from first principles, if you want to build like the ocean robot company, right? You need a few things. You need full XYZ access on the ocean as a domain. Okay, so to do that, you need a surface craft because there's less drag on the surface. So that's where you should be doing most of your transit. And then you drop an underwater vehicle to go down. So we developed this autonomous surface vehicle called Leviathan, 2000 nautical mile range. And that goes and drops the kids off to school, so to speak, to go, you know, go do what they want. And underwater vehicle then is called Mako.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  It's launched into the water, that goes and finds the location where it needs to do the job. It goes scans something or robotically manipulate something. And then it gets Leviathan will say, come home. And it goes in and then that's the end of the mission. The state of underwater vehicles before we started building Mako were primarily to gather data and not to do robotics. The vehicle looks a lot different if you want to build something that can physically kind of manipulate underwater. So there was a few design decisions we had to make there. Also, our underwater vehicle, you know, we wanted to build one kind of general purpose form factor that could solve a lot of different problems. So there was some like pretty, like, you know, clear design decisions that we made at the start where our underwater vehicle Mako is made of these kind of Lego building blocks that make it up.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  So if you want to add, let's say, an extra 150 nautical miles of endurance and range, you just add extra battery packs because we knew some people would want that. Other people would want the vehicle to go faster. So even different, we're a thruster module. Some people want to take images underwater. So we have stereo cameras that can give you 3D imaging. Some people want sonar, you know, bathymetric maps. So we have like a sonar front module. So, yeah, there was a few very deliberate early design decisions which enabled us then, when the US Navy comes knocking and says, hey, we've got some problems you'd like to just work on, or offshore energy companies that, oh, well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it was very easy for us to adapt.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Let's, can we dig into that for a second?

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Because like, a few things. First of all, just for all the geeks, I'd love to hear why seagrass? And like how it compares as a, as a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there?

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, seagrass is, you know, it's like your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that. It's like the most like slept on like plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Carl, you know, is the, is the very like good looking friend or something like that that gets all the attention. But seagrass is really who you should be talking to.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Carl gets a lot of the funding and seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean. It covers, you know, 2% of the seafloor but holds 20% of the ocean's carbon. It is the, the ocean being the world's largest natural carbon sink anyway. So it's like very important in that regard. About 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat. And so it's just very, very important. Very important species, doesn't really get that much attention. It grows on up and down the coastlines of Ireland, the UK, here in California. Actually, the same species in Ireland and California on the East Coast in Australia. So, yeah, we're working across, we've got projects in Virginia, in Southern Florida, in California now, in Sausalito, and a few other locations, also in Great Barrier Reef.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Well, you started the company through seagrass restoration and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You still, you haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass projects?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, like fundamentally, the tech platform we're building, again, because we made these early design decisions mean that like, well, you know, it's like you kind of like, you build the technology once that does, that does like the seagrass restoration and then like, then it's just more of like, scaling that business is more of like an operational problem. Like there's not any new net new R and D we have to do to serve new contracts in that. We've already built the underlying IP. It's just like, do you have enough operators that can go in the field and operate it? And the core platform of under vehicle sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is like, you know, and it's something that can then go off and work at the folks in the energy sector or.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  What do you have to do to restore seagrass?

• 13:44Speaker 00

  You have to collect this, first of all, you have to understand where to restore. So you have to map and understand where is there, where is there seagrass, where is there not? On top of that, then you'd run a pretty rudimentary model called a habitat suitability model to say, well, based on the depth and the water clarity and these other features, we think these areas would be good for restoration. Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds? And you go and collect the seeds. And we see videos of this on the ULC's Twitter account. We just posted like a seed collection video just like yesteryear. And then you bring the seeds then to the locations that need seeds, that you've identified in the habitat suitability model, and then you drop, you deposit them there.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  And then, all going well.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  So I want to dive into that a little bit because, what's, sorry. As Lower Carbon Capital, our firm has been involved with you since before the, for the, before the pre-seed. First of all, yeah. Etc. But, and so we should talk about that later and all the hustle that made that happen. But I can say with confidence that you've had from the beginning, the vision of, how do we build a universal thing, make it extensible to all of these applications? Both interventions and the data you're gathering has been literally in the original presentation. But how do you choose seagrass initially? And, and I'm curious, is it, how much of that was mission driven? How much of that is caring about the climate? How much of that is who you can recruit initially?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And how much of it is like, that's where the money was for the first contracts?

• 15:19Speaker 00

  I think it's, you know, it's probably like, you know, some combination of all of them. But I think it was very much just like a passion thing, you know, to begin with. Like, I grew up by the seaside. I had very, you know, very much like my mom would just put me in a wetsuit and like send me down to the beach and that was like my babysitter in the suburbs. I'm very much, you know, like a very pro-growth environmentalist and a very like eco-pragmatist is maybe how I describe myself. A beautiful flourishing future for humanity has an economy that's consistently growing. And, you know, a biosphere that supports that consistently growing economy. And like carbon removal is like one of those core technologies that like, I think enables that along with clean energy and other, other things. And, and then, yeah, just like the ocean has this like frontier, is a very true frontier.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  It's like, you know, we've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have like our, the depths of our ocean. And like, that like, I just couldn't, when I like heard that or like meditated on that a little bit more, I was like, God, this is crazy, right? Like, there is, there is like a, there is a part of Earth that, over 75% of it, we have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there. And like, you know, less than maybe 100 people are thinking about this and working this on a daily basis. Like, for how long was all of like Western civilization focused on exploration? And now like, okay, we're doing space. We have this whole other frontier here and you're telling me there's like, there's a fraction of people actually working on this day to day?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  I was like, this is crazy. This is insane that like, like, put the money aside, you know, like, and just think like, humans need to explore and discover and learn.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And part of your thesis is, if I understand this, just like SpaceX, you know, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink if you can get things up into orbit cheaply. Similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Yes, I think there is this like very kind of generalizable framework for how kind of frontiers get developed. You know, the American West is a good example of this. It's like you have this like, you know, exploratory period where people go there and go back. And they typically go there and go back for some kind of like very high value reason, where the cost of going there, you know, is justified because you're recovering fur. Or you're, you're getting pelts or something like that.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  There's a single high value initial use case.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  And then in space, it's defense reasons. Putting satellites up there to watch the Russians.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  So there's like, there's this, there's this initial expedition period. And then you move from an expedition period to, okay, well, what happens if we spend more time here and get more? And what happens when we not just like gather like information from here or singular things, but more things? And become more persistent in our settlement there? So then in American West, you have the development of the railroad and then like access becomes way more easy. You get all this, you know, development of places like California. Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you could actually go and like have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things I think that you can, you can do.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  If you want to go plant a bunch of seagrass, like, do you get approval from anyone on that? Or is it just seagrass away?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, you know, I think this is like the, kind of one of the saddest things about the environmental movement is you have this concept of like green tape, right? Like red tape and green tape. It's like, yeah, it's like that is like the single biggest barrier. For example, like there is a certain very endangered location of seagrasses in Australia that we would love to do a project, that we've been trying to do a project for a long time. And it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world, in a very important location. But kind of, you know, banging your head off the wall.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  How did you end up in the Chinese prison?

• 19:00Speaker 00

  This is the topic. I was in a.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  I want to get back to the robots.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  I, you know, in, you know, there was an interesting time in, you know, the 2010s where China's on this like ascending path or whatever. And my mom was like, well, you got to learn rather than. So I go to Shanghai, I'm about 16 years of age, 15 years of age, and go there. And we end up in like some night market and we were there a week before and we go back a week later. And they falsely accuse us of shoplifting. And I think it was this kind of scam they had, like, you know, they would bring these kind of white kids or something like in and then.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  The scam who had?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  People in the, in the thing. Because what would happen is when they, when they accuse you of the crime.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  You have to pay a fine on the spot.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  You have to pay, well, you get brought to the prison station or the police station. And you remember, this is the time before like instant money sending, right? You know, historian of the markets would know this as well. Yeah, crazy time. So it's Western Union, the money. And like that takes like, you know, it's like China's like whatever, nine hours ahead of Ireland and it's like. Ten o'clock at night, so my mom's not awake. So you know, you ring her, whatever, three in the morning or, you know, whatever. She's up. Or, you know, it's nine in the morning, Ireland time. She's awake. So I'm like, Mom, you know, I'm in this prison, Shanghai prison. Can you like, uh, like send Western Union me the money and get me out? She's like, okay, all right. So they, you know, the, the value of the phones that we shoplifted.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Of course, nowadays they just write it off as a deep fake AI scam.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, now that's an 11 labs call. That's an 11 labs call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Send them to me in iTunes.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:37Speaker 01

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• 21:19Speaker 02

  As I look back, and I did, I looked back at the original pitch you came to us with. But as I look back at that and, um, and think about how you from day one were thinking about all of the ways this company could, all the markets it could address and what it could do. But at the core of it was making, making the vehicle. If you had come to a venture capitalist 10, 12 years ago, for some, maybe six years ago, and said, hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing. We're actually going to build things in the US. We are not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen or whatever. And so we're going to, and for those components that seem like the supply chain might be dicey,

• 22:03Speaker 02

  we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device. That would get you shown to the parking lot.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  So how verticalized are you guys and where did you start? Where are you going to?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  It's this kind of iterative process that we've kind of, you know, the first, you know, the first vehicle has maybe, you know, 80% pieces off the shelf. And we're on like generation five now. And a lot, and the next generation, particularly over the course of the next year, we're going to bring a lot of it in-house.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  So, uh, you know, to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the mech, the alec and the software. The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch in-house. We're not really building on top of any other primitives. We've kind of built it up from the ground up because we're building a very different type of vehicle. The modularity requires a lot of interesting things. Um, so then.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  But presumably those hardware actuation frameworks that you use like.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, like there, there is things, but frankly, we've kind of just like issued a lot of them. There, you know, there's things you can be, there's like Open Roz and there's, there's other like, there's like, um, yeah, there's a, there's a few different ones, but, um, yeah, we're sharing a lot of them and kind of building a lot from the ground up. Cause our vehicle looks a lot, a lot different to a lot of other underwater robots. And then there's the alec. So like in that, like you've got like sensors and then the internals of the vehicle. So a lot of the, you know, if we talk about the sensors and that sort of thing, there's a, you know, how do you, how do you perceive, you know, it's like, uh, you're typically using like a sonar system of some description. Again, right now that's off, that's by, we're buying them off the shelf or sonar systems.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  But we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustic system now to start building them in-house and sell from, from next year. Then the navigation stack as a part of this kind of like, uh, part of the vehicle. There is, uh, you know, inertial navigation systems. Again, right now we buy them off the shelf, but we've got like internal prototypes that, that we're going to start building in-house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in-house. Right now, an inertial navigation system works and then.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  There's different ways of building them. Um, you know, you've got like fiber optic gyros, um, which use, uh, which is like one way. Um, you've got MEMS, uh, sensors which are, you know, in your iPhone or whatever that, um, that are kind of like accelerometers that you can, you can use as well. And, um, uh, we're, uh, so I won't go into the, how we're building ours. But, uh, yes, initial prototypes, initial prototypes and our initial one is a, put it at a fraction of the price of the very expensive, long lead time supplier that we're using right now. And, and building our supply chain that we could scale.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Well, but I'm, I'm curious, why build your own inertial navigation? Is it cost? Is it lead time? Is this like ultimately you need to get the device or the.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  For us, it's, for us, it's scale, lead time, you know, right? There's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. There's maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. For us to really fully manifest our vision, we need to build millions of underwater drones. Therefore I need to, we, we look at supply chains and like, can we build them at supply chain? So insofar as we can, we try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone, uh, supply chains where we can't, where I have to buy from somewhere else or consumer electronics supply chains where things are made in the order of millions, um, and not maritime.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  So you're building at a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale and everything needs to.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, like the, we will, we will open a facility next year. That, that could be like one of the largest by number of units, like underwater drone facility, uh, like factories in the world. So like, and I think there's a decent, like right, right now, where our company is right now, our main problem is building, building things. We are saying no contracts. We, uh, have more demand than we can supply. There are the, the things that we think about on a daily basis right now are not like, how do we sell more? It's how do we build a factory? And how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack that, like, for example, there is, um,

• 25:57Speaker 00

  one part of our supply chain that the, we, we kind of like baited out of the supplier, how many of these components they make or per year right now. And they make like a hundred to 200 per annum. I mean, like that's, you know, like there's no way that we're, we're, we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year. Maybe a thousand. Um, so it's like, we can't build on top of that.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  We, we find this all the time. It's both with our companies and our own investment thesis is that, like as you start diving in, somebody brings you a cool idea, somebody brings you a cool prototype. They go ahead and it's cobbled together in the same way that Elon was getting components from Mercedes and shit like that to put the first one together. But then as you start scaling, you start to notice bottlenecks. Whether they're intrinsic to the way you're building something or to rolling it out, et cetera. And then with each of those bottlenecks, you now know there's an opportunity to resolve that. It's not unlike what you guys have done in Stripe, but. So we've done that in our own investing thesis where we start to see, you know, grid resiliency as a thing. And then you start to see like, oh shit, you know what, you know what there's a shortage of? It's transformers. And so we've got these guys, Giga,

• 27:00Speaker 02

  who taught themselves how to build transformers in their backyard using YouTube videos. Somehow nobody died. And now they, and then they went to China to see how China manufactures them and brought that back. I love fucking.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And now they're making transformers.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  And now they make transformers in a way that's not all hand spun. It's amazing.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  We definitely haven't done that either.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, and so.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  I can't comment.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  So I love this path and I, it's something that I know your, your audience will love is that we have now started to see companies like this really get to be supply chain experts and see what's standing in the way of their 100X from today. And, and it really, it is a religion that came out of SpaceX and Tesla.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  My co-founders, literally all he works on is manufacturing. We have four co-founders, Cullen, all he does is pretty much manufacturing. And Rul is the same. One co-founder is like pretty much all on like manufacturing. Like I think it's like, it's just kind of default state.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Saltwater in the ocean is a very hostile environment. What's harder than people realize when you're building a robot that lives in the ocean?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  You know, corrosion is like, and pressure or like huge like external forces, but you know, corrosion, you can get around it by coating. Uh, you're doing like anodizing, um, the, the, the surface of the metal, um, which gives it like some resistance, pressure. Again, you can mitigate, I mean, you know, going very deep sea, which would be 6,000 meters is what we call full ocean depth. I mean, the ocean goes to about 10,000 meters in its deepest parts, but full ocean depth in a technical term is the 6,000. That's very difficult. We operate currently in like the 1500, up to 1500 meters. I mean, we've been crush tested to 2,200 meters, but, um, you know, we're typically operating in that 1500 meter range, which is where most of the important economic activity today happens. In the future, I think much more will happen in the DC, particularly in critical minerals.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  But today a lot of the economic activity happens there. So, uh, pressure is one problem. I think the biggest problem though is, is comms underwater.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask that. Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  So how do you communicate with the maker?

• 28:55Speaker 00

  A lot of it has to run locally. You have to do a lot of sense because you can acoustically-

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Because communications are very low bandwidth.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Yes, you can do like 10 kilobytes per second over like five kilometers.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Over like HF or what?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Acoustically, ping, like a dial-up modem. And then just like being far away from, being far away from anything, you know, like is very difficult. You know, being far from someone that can repair you or recharge you. So that's why the surface vehicle is such an important part of our stack because you pick it up, you put it on deck, it wirelessly charges, otherwise it rewards, it charges underwater vehicles and then connects us to the internet so that we can get a live diagnostic on the vehicle, what's working, what's not working. And then, you know, if someone needs to come in and do an intervention, I mean, in future, the surface craft will actually be able to repair the vehicle and have like replacement modules and kind of vending machines.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Surface vehicle is autonomous too.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's connected then to Starlink so we can see, and Starlink is a huge enabling technology for us. That's, you know, that's one part of it. That's why we go for the surface vehicle. Another thing is like, yeah, we have like, you know, around 100 times more onboard compute than any other autonomous underwater vehicle. We run a full like Nvidia 1590 onboard with like an Intel CPU. And that's been very important to our autonomy stack. Because again, if you want to do anything intelligent robotically underwater, you need to have like a lot, you need to be able to sense make to like a large degree.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so but basically just to make a, you know, if it's doing some mapping or whatever, do you send it down with a fully built plan and program? And it's basically, it is running the full loop of sensing and deciding locally on the GPUs on the device?

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, like right now, the autonomy is like relatively rudimentary. We haven't got into like very complex kind of like autonomy behaviors just yet. But not many of our tasks were core just yet, but yes.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  But they sent it is autonomous, it is fully locally autonomous?

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, it will be like draw a polygon, it's like map this area, okay.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Auto generates a lawnmower track. And then it'll have some like rudimentary, okay, if I see a rock, let me just like go above that. Or if I see like something else, go around it.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then what applications are you having most success with, with the robot right now? Like, what are you selling the robot for?

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Right now, I mean, there's kind of two domains in which we've had like a lot of success in the last year. The, so nature was kind of what we did and focused on kind of first year, last year. You know, this has been the second year of the business, we kind of like started to look at other use cases. So last year, we got our first contract with the US Navy and we got our first contract with an offshore wind developer as well. So US Navy was, actually, you know, we were doing mine countermeasures, finding mines and hunting mines before it was cool. Before, before the Straits of Hormuz popped off, so we were, we were working on some work related to that. And then the offshore-

• 31:51Speaker 02

  I haven't heard Straits of Hormuz popped off. That's pretty sweet. Way to appeal to his younger listeners.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And then the, the offshore wind contract was, you know, where, actually, there's this problem in California where they're trying to build a floating offshore wind where they need to, one of the objections to the floating offshore wind is that you put these power cables in the water, they attract abandoned fishing lines. The fishing lines then are what catch dolphins and whales and these sorts of things. And that's like one of the biggest obstructions to offshore wind in California. And so it's like, could you build, we built, we're building this sensing system, like a surface underwater vehicle that will map these cables on a daily basis, look at their structural integrity and see if they're in good condition. And also if they're getting lines cut on them and if there is a line caught on them, we have a, we're building an implement that will cut the fishing lines off of the offshore, floating offshore wind lines.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  So why are the offshore wind turbines getting caught up in lines of problem?

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Basically, when you build a floating offshore wind terminal and then you have like the cable running up.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I see.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  That cable's in the water.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  I see.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  And just you just have like-

• 32:53Speaker 01

  It's the power cable that's feeding the power back to it.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. And then you might just have like a fishing net floating through the water that, that is like, has fallen off some Japanese, you know, fishing line like a thousand miles.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  It's debris direction.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Debris and it'll get caught in that.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Can you, can we bring that over?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Excellent. Okay, we'll give you guys some-

• 33:10Speaker 02

  It's so weird. I didn't mean to set you up, but when we talk about craft and beauty.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Oh. Are you doing a product placement right here?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  This is, man. This is a tequila that we make, actually.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And it's the only 100-point tequila in history.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  You're drinking with two Irishmen and you didn't bring whiskey. You're in an Irish bar.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  It's because-

• 33:27Speaker 00

  This is a-

• 33:28Speaker 02

  And you bring your own-

• 33:30Speaker 00

  I am an American and we are imperialist.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  You bring your own-

• 33:33Speaker 01

  This is your tequila?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Yes. And so this is Komos Tequila. Komos with a K.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Do you not think post the TV show Silicon Valley, it's a bit on the nose to make your own tequila?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Trace Komos. No, this is actually literally called Komos.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  It's Komos.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  But this is, it's the only 100-point tequila in history. It's very unorthodox, but it's partly aged in wine barrels. And so, and then it also spent some time aerating, so it's like the smoothest drinking tequila ever. But it makes no sense to do it this way. Nobody had done it before, but we care about that stuff. And so I want to say cheers, but I, there is a weird tie-in to what you just said about design and beauty.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  That is the smoothest tequila in the world. One of the great cultural things about you and you is you guys both, I think, would identify as heterodox. But what is it about you guys who-

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Don't ask where I'm from.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Seem to be, no, no, but I, but I, but I think you're emblematic of the movement right now. What is it about you guys? What do you have in common? What's changed?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  I think the American difference is, you know, the founders look very different, right? It's like, I think you alluded to this earlier, it's like, they're kind of rah rah, smoking, kind of like go to church on Sunday. Very, maybe a bit louder, working typically on hardware rather than software. No disrespect to Y Combinator, but there's, you know, the make something people want moniker or something like that. And I think this group is way more like make something the world needs. You know, it's like, it's a different motivation. There is seemingly more of a kind of a spiritual or a, you know, a kind of like reason to like why people start their businesses, I think. Like, and that's definitely true for, for myself, or at least a motivation in it.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  I think, you know, I often think of there being like head and heart type founders where, you know, Jeff Bezos is the canonical head-based founder, where, or head-oriented founder, where it's like, you know, the internet was growing at 30% per annum and I saw that, oh, what would be the best thing to sell on the internet? Oh, books are good because you can move them easily and they don't go off and-

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Dashboards, yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like, and then he starts Amazon, but you know, and then like just, yeah, Steve Jobs being the canonical like heart-based founder or something, you know, the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid, you know, like all this kind of like, this kind of other way. And I think this like era of like hard tech founders are way more oriented on kind of the heart-based or something like that. And yeah, there's like this interesting spiritual vibe. And I think there's like potentially interesting reasons for that. I mean, like, you know, a lot of us grow, were like very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. Like a lot of us are typically in our like later twenties now, but we're like in college or something like that one had and it kind of made me feel a little bit cheated or something. Or we were forced to be in the digital world so we like feel to cause impact in the physical world, perhaps. There is, you know, maybe some potentially interesting reasons there.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in where more people are going back to organized religion and like, or we grew up through maybe kind of crazy woke era stuff or something like that and we're very colored by that or, yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  I know you want to ask more about the robots, but do you want to talk about faith for a second? Because that's something that, I mean, that was something you would never talk about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley. But I'm curious about that. Like that has been a real sea change. And how does that, do you think it matters? Where does that come from?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  I think it speaks to an underlying change in the world. I think, I think, I think there's a, I mean, it's very important to me. It's how I've met like a lot of my closer, like closest friends here in San Francisco, I've been through like church. I live with three other guys. All of them are Christian, all of them like run tech companies. And so, yeah, it has been like how I've kind of found my community here. And yeah, it's definitely noticeable. And like, yeah, all of my friends who like are typically Christian are also like building companies like in, in the real world or in some capacity. So using my, you know, small sample, you know, I might have to use students' T-test to see the reliability of this. But like, there is definitely a correlation here with like guys who believe in God and believe in like heaven

• 37:37Speaker 00

  and believe in like, I need to live a good life or else I don't go to heaven. And then they build these companies that make it rain, that do autonomous cargo, that do ocean robots, that like there's, there's definitely-

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Making it rain in particular is, you know-

• 37:50Speaker 00

  That is literally biblical.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  So I have more questions on the robots. Sorry, I keep bringing us back to the robots. If I have a bunch of offshore wind turbines, I don't, but if I did, and I wanted them to be flotsam and jetsam free.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  What are my options right now? Do I pay someone with a boat to go inspect them? And so is this like a, you just sell cheaper inspections?

• 38:13Speaker 00

  The broad

• 38:15Speaker 01

  How are you selling to the, like, what's the pitch meeting look like?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  The broad shape, again, the beauty of our business is that like, the same way that business is done, or operations, maritime operations is done for the Navy, for the ocean conservation, for the energy folks is all pretty much the same. Big expensive surface ship and as you know, we're not building ships fast enough these days. So it's like, there's a backlog to even get the ship. Once you even get the ship, you're chartering it at, you know, an order of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a day.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  What are they cost to make, by the way? We haven't really talked about the core economics of what you're making versus what they're making.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  So, uh, yeah, so we've, on the underwater vehicle, uh, we can sell them. So we primarily only sell them when we're working with, with navies, with the offshore industry folks. They want to buy services office or running this like services business. But if you're working with the Navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000. For contrast, the most common like autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is like somewhere on the order of maybe five million dollars. Um, so, uh, yeah.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  So you're targeting a two orders of magnitude cost improvement?

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Now, that's for the base vehicle. Once you add the leather seats and the other nice things, you know.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Premium subscription.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Exactly. But no, frankly, when you add like advanced sensing, advanced navigation. But even still, it's like, then you get to one order.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  You have a low cost platform that then you can add sensors.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, um, so that's like, that's the underwater vehicle. And the surface vehicle is like, um, you know, um, that is like less than a million dollars, more than maybe half a million, but it depends.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  So Chris was flagging earlier, bad buyers kill companies. And I think this is true. Where if you're selling to governments or multi-year procurement cycles or something like that, just like fairly frequently, the company can run out of money before the buyer has a chance to finish the procurement process. It strikes me that you kind of have bad buyers where, I mean, you have some private companies buying from you and everything like this, but it's long procurement cycles and, uh, you know, some selling to governments. And so how do you, how do you deal with this? Or you can push back the premise, but, um, the fact that ultimately your time to revenue is longer than for other companies.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  You know, so right now, um, you know, the two main groups we're selling to are, yes, Navy and offshore energy. And yes, both of them have, you have to go through in the, on the energy side, you have to do all these health and safety things. You have to get onto a master services agreement. You have to ladder your way up to that. Government, kind of same. You have to get on, put on a contract vehicle, get the clearances, all the stuff. I think they're like actually the shape of business that venture scale, like, you know, venture companies are actually very well suited to go after. Like we can afford to, to, to kind of invest the money in the R and D and wait because once you win those contracts, you're very sticky, actually. You're very sticky and, um,

• 41:10Speaker 00

  you're kind of hard to pull out and, uh, they're like, they don't want to wait two years to put someone else in against you. So, um, I have always been attracted to, to, I mean, my, my first startup was, um, kind of the first scooter sharing startup in the UK and Ireland. And, uh, uh, that's where I like learned to kind of sell to government and I loved it. I loved it for two reasons. I mean, once you won a contract, it was very difficult to lose them because, uh, just very sticky customers. But also you're like seeing your technology go into the hands of people that like really need it. Like, um, my, my underlying kind of thesis around my own entrepreneurial path has been like, first startup was like, uh, you know, going into, uh, you know, transport in trying to change that. This is now going into like the public domain, a public good, working with defense

• 41:54Speaker 00

  or going into the ocean in general, which is a public good, um, and trying to like, uh, build, deploy technology into it. But, um, you know, 60 years ago, the people working are thinking about these problems, like most commonly like transport and things were, were not guys who were like here in San Francisco. They were like in some like government job or something like that. And my underlying premise around technology has just always been like, I think like public services or public domain, um, technologies are like maybe the most interesting because, um, you know, if you, if you think that like, uh, yeah, the smartest person in 1960 was probably going working in government or now they're going, working in San Francisco. Ergo, uh, the, the kind of like an increasing share of the things that were previously the reserve of government are now going to be the reserve of, uh, private companies. So it's like, there is a future where like Ulysses is the largest Navy in the world.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Uh, and you're like, we're there, that I just like stored in the ocean.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  US Navy is pretty big.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yes. I bet she has more craft soon. But I'll, I'll tell you, as an investor, once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very reliable and very, and very bankable. So it may take some time, but that's what our business is, is to bridge that to where it comes through. And I'll, and, and strangely, whether it's as a hard tech investor or even in some of the decarbonization work we do, one of the most sober and consistent customers for the work we do is the Department of Defense.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  But they're actually a good buyer?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  When you get to the people who actually get shit done at these organizations, they're incredibly well informed and, and the, the decisions are apolitical and very, and sober. And so when somebody comes inbound to him, that's the other thing, like, when you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have. So they're paying attention. And when they come in and say, look, you solve a problem for us at one hundredth of the cost we pay today. So once that we get to that contracting process, it may take a while to fill out your master services agreement, your SLAs and shit, but the reality is that's very bankable.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And they're using you for mine clearing stuff, the Navy?

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, so I might actually just go back to the, one of your original questions, how is work on the ocean today and how are you different? Cause it kind of like makes the rest of the things clear. And again, draws a consistent through line. So like, again, most important work today is like a few hundred thousand dollars for a ship per day to go out and do something. On that ship, because you're going and then you're like, typically have like a bunch of guys on board. If you want to do something underwater, you put like this tethered vehicle and you're remote operating. And you look at the screens and you take shifts and you go and do the thing underwater. Um, you find the mine, um, you repair the pipeline, whatever, you know, whatever it may be. And so again, they all have this shape, um, on seagrass. And, uh, but then the problem is then it's like, okay, well, because due to like, uh, union laws and labor laws, it's like, okay, well, people can only max work like maybe eight hours a day

• 44:33Speaker 00

  and you want to work 24 hours because you're going out there anyways. You need three people then. And then it's like, okay, um, each of those people like has a manager and like, and then you have like the ship captain and then you have the, the second mate and then you have like the guy who needs to cook the spaghetti. And then you have the doctor because you've gone over the eight people and you left from the US port. It's like, so you, you end up with like this massive crew, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. And, um, and that's a broad shape of all the tasks underwater. So then the idea is if you can, yeah, do that autonomously, you don't have any of the labor cost, you can control over Starlink, any nice, we're free.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Can you work in worse sea conditions than?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And you go fast as well. You can go fast with the water. Like when people are bored, you can't, you get seasick.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Do you compete with the neoprenees for some of these, uh, like ceramic or those kind of folks?

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Not, the ceramic don't have an underwater vehicle. They're building ships and like, they're just going to become a new shipyard. And I think where we're different maybe from like an underoil or otherwise is like the thing we're thinking about is like, again, robots will do an increasing share of the work in the future. Who builds the underwater ones? A lot of the folks in the defense sector are thinking, how do we make things go boom? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any nomads can put C4 on a vehicle and make it go boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is like, how do you build a general purpose underwater robotic platform? And, uh, that's the thing that we think unlocks the ocean at scale. That's the thing that like turns it from a three trillion dollar economy into a 10 trillion plus place for commerce.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  The undersea cables, how worried should we be about?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Totally asymmetric. Jesus. Um, uh, like totally. This is, I think this is like, uh, yeah, this is like one of those.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Do you guys have any undersea cable angle?

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we have, we have like, we have one, um, we have some work in that domain. Yes. I can't, I can't talk about it too much. No, no, I can't talk about it too much. But yes, there is a, there is basically a need to create a, you know, again, you know, the kind of, the advocate, what we're trying to advocate the maritime domain to move away from is this like episodic, singular campaign thing more like we are creating permanent settlements there, like, like we're trying to do in space. And a part of that would be like a persistent defense network around, um, yeah, like all, all like kind of critical waterways. So, um, very critical waterways off the west coast of Ireland. All of the cables that run from the US into Europe, like pretty much like cross into Ireland.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  So that's like, that's like one like area that you might highlight as a choke point. There's a number of these. There's a number of them in Asia, in the Middle East. All of these areas should just be like persistently monitored 24/7. But it's much too expensive to do that manually. So, um, yes, that's a, that's a, that's a massive.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  I mean, so a hundred years ago, I used to co-lead the team at Google that built all the data centers. And we also did the transoceanic fiber and so on. So data centers are fragile and fiber is even more fragile. And the way you take a data center offline is you bring a pair of fucking garden shears and you cut the fiber that goes.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And there's many fewer cables than people think.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  And by the way, like I found one in Oregon. I, no one used to publish their fiber maps. And so the way I would find them to figure out where I wanted to site a data center is I would drive around the coast until I saw call before you dig signs. And once in Oregon, I encountered some call before you dig signs. The street was called Five Nines. What kind, only a fucking geek would name a street Five Nines. And I was like, yep, I got it now. And then we'd follow the call before you dig. And so, but if you really want to take a data center offline, until we have Starlink and other diverse opportunity, you know, like diverse providers in that space, you literally snip the fiber and it's offline, right? I say this partly because, uh, partly we should be aware of this because we need to protect it.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Partly also to other humans. In the event we do get to a boom moment in AI, we might all have to do our part.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Let people know.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  We might have to all do our part to kill the data centers.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  That's funny.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  I'm sure I just put myself on the naughty list.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  That's a bad fact to have in the pre-train.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  But the reality is right now, it is when you, it is the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West before for what you do, it really is that. And we do need protection of those resources out there.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, but, so we have about, I think it's about 200 undersea cables today. And, uh, they typically only get taken out by, um, anchor dragging is accidental for the most part, some of them not. But if you did want to do a targeted like, um, demolition, like many of them, um, it's like not crazy hard.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  But I also don't know what, like, they get snooped. And so I get read in and they get snooped and.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  As in tapped?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, like it's not hard for China to go listen to those things. And so, and read everything. It's actually the least fortified, like it's hard for them to get into a hardened facility in downtown San Francisco. It's running all your traffic.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  But on Five Nine Street in Oregon.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yes. It's very easy for them to hang out and listen. And so, um, we need patrols there for sure.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  We're going to have to leave it there. Chris?

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Thank you guys.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, right on, man. Cheers, guys. Cheers.