7 Wild Business Ideas for this $3 Trillion Dollar Frontier

Sam Parr

That episode was a whirlwind.

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

And it wasn't just about the business and the ideas that he talked about, but the mindset and how he thought about the philosophy of life that inspired me.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So, okay, what are we talking about? We're talking about how the ocean is the new space. There are companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, all these companies that are doing cool things 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 it. But then we talked about the conversation toward the end, which 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. The end is really good, so get there to the end. I promise you will enjoy this episode. Alright, what's up? We got our friend Will O'Brien here. 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. There are companies like SpaceX and others that have built huge, hundred billion dollar plus companies about exploring space, about putting satellites in space, about reusable rockets. 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. 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 the opportunity is. 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?

Sam Parr

Dude, I won't even go on a cruise ship. I was at a party the other day, and the icebreaker question was, "What's something you're deathly afraid of?" For me, it's being in the ocean where I can't see land. So, I'm not even going to be out there. But yeah, I agree with your premise.

Shaan Puri

And will I kind of frame your argument right as to the potential that you see regarding the business opportunity of building startups that are focused on the ocean?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, absolutely. I think the framing is something like this: everyone is here standing on Earth, looking towards the stars. We should be doing that. We should be going full pelt with trying to go interplanetary, trying to put a base on the Moon, and take the dark side of the Moon. From there, we can use it as a landing point to go to Mars. We should also be trying to fly supersonic. But then, if you're trying to build a startup, you're always asking yourself, "What is everyone else looking to do? Where is everyone else going? Where is it underrated?" I grew up by the seaside in the southwest of Ireland, and I've always been obsessed with the ocean. If I wasn't on it, in it, or near it growing up, there was something wrong. In the same way that you're afraid of some things, when I'm away from the ocean, I feel something is wrong with me. I've always been thinking about it. If you look at it in fundamental terms, the ocean economy right now is already massive. It's not like the future space economy is going to be massive; the ocean economy is massive. It's about $3 trillion in annual spending in different ways. It covers 70% of the planet, and 3 billion people rely on it as their primary source of food, while a billion rely on it as their primary source of income. While we have robots on Mars and low-cost drones in our skies, the technology in our oceans still pales in comparison. You look at the ships that are out there today; much of the technology is very similar to what we had years ago. The unmanned underwater drones are pretty much the same as well. The key core technology stacks supporting the key pillars of the ocean—whether it be transport, fisheries, defense, energy, or biodiversity—are stagnant. Large-scale incumbents are offering solutions that are running on ancient software, and there's very little innovation going on. If you ask someone, "What is a sexy ocean startup?" they kind of scratch their heads for a bit. Whereas if you ask them about space, it's like SpaceX straight away. You ask them about aerospace, and it's like, "Ah, boom!" So, this is the core of the thesis.

Sam Parr

Sean, you just wound him up really easily. This is going to be one of those podcasts. 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."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like, "Aye, aye, let's go!" So, Sam just shared a bunch of stats. Which of those surprised you? I'm just going to rattle a couple back. He said, "Alright, this one probably doesn't surprise you: 70% of the Earth is covered in water." I think only 25% has ever been explored. He also mentioned that a billion people rely on the ocean for their primary source of income, and 3 billion people rely on it for their diet. Can you explain that? What’s the connection between diet and jobs in terms of income?

Will O'Brien

Oh, it's just like people, you know? Most of, I mean, human societies generally settle along coastlines. This is a very common trend.

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

Alright, so what were some other stats, Sean, that caught your eye?

Shaan Puri

A billion people rely on it for their income. So, what are the jobs that you're talking about here? Are you talking about fisheries, shipping, or is it like defense? What is that? Are those the big three, or am I missing something big and obvious?

Will O'Brien

The framing for me, how I think about the ocean economy, is that you generally break it up into three categories. First, you have the **biosphere**. This includes your fisheries, ecosystem restoration, environmental mapping, and science in the ocean. It's all about biosphere management. Then, you have the **prosperity-oriented** part. This is the commercial aspect, which includes energies, infrastructures, oil and gas, and data infrastructure. It also encompasses logistics and shipping. Finally, you have the aspect of **keeping the seas safe**. This involves defense and security, border security, critical infrastructure protection, and deploying ships in the South China Sea, among other things.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of these legacy players in shipbuilding and unmanned systems. One player that's interesting in the online systems space, and has been around for a long time—over a decade now—is Saildrone. They were really one of the first players to start doing interesting new things in the ocean.

Shaan Puri

What problem are they solving? What does Saildrone do?

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

They look amazing! Yeah, they look awesome.

Will O'Brien

They build these huge vessels, massive sailboats that can basically stay at sea for many months at a time. You can put a load of fancy sensors on them that can take data from the water, gather video footage at the surface, and then relay that information back to someone, like a government agency in the United States, such as NOAA. They want to know how much fish is in the seas off Alaska. They could sell this data to the U.S. Navy to know how deep the waters are in and around Guam or something like that. They sell these things as a service. There's a very interesting founder; he seems like a super sharp guy who's been obsessed with sailing for decades. Again, like a lot of these ocean founders you see, they are very, very passionate about the ocean. It's the kind of thing that people often get obsessed with and then try to make a business out of it.

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

Ulysses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ulysses. Ulysses. We're building a general-purpose autonomy platform for maritime operations.

Shaan Puri

Say that like we're stupid.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

Autonomous robots for the ocean to do important things.

Sam Parr

Okay, and what's one important thing that you would do? For example, you would go to a pipe in the ocean and determine if it has a hole in it.

Will O'Brien

That is something you could do. Our first business line has been working with this weird plant that you've probably never heard of. There's this plant in the ocean that's probably about 10 times more abundant than coral reefs. It is 35 times better than rainforests at removing carbon. It holds about 20% of the carbon in the ocean and supports about a quarter of the world's most critically important fish stocks. It's called **seagrass**. It's basically just grass in the ocean, and this plant is dying off at an insane rate all around the world, with a 7% loss per annum. If you follow these trends, we could lose it all.

Sam Parr

Our stuff... a year of this thing is going away.

Will O'Brien

Okay, why is...

Shaan Puri

Is it dying because of pollution, or what? What's the cause?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, there are a few things to consider. I mean, water quality is a very common cause for loss. Other factors include construction around coastlines, such as digging, dredging, and changing ocean temperatures and currents. These sorts of things impact it. Basically, the context here is that many governments around the world are really panicking about this. If they lose their seagrasses, they lose their fish stocks. If they lose their fish stocks, there are 1 billion people who rely on it for food and 3 billion people who depend on it for income. They are in a tough situation. Restoring it, i.e., bringing it back, is currently a very manual process.

Sam Parr

And how are you guys doing that?

Will O'Brien

We build autonomous robots to do it.

Sam Parr

And you're actually building the robots yourself? When you said you're building a platform, I thought that meant you're allowing other people to build it and use your technology to track them.

Will O'Brien

Yeah, so for this first use case, we've built a kind of custom robotic payload. You know, when you're starting and trying to do something new, it's important to get initial traction in a weird place. I think if we just build something and hope that people would use it, we might have trouble getting traction. So, we started off with this initial use case. We basically built these attachments that go onto our underwater vehicle. These attachments are designed for collecting seeds, planting seeds, and measuring their growth to gain that initial traction. In our first year, we did a million dollars in revenue with a team of five people based here in San Francisco.

Sam Parr

Why would someone pay you to do this?

Will O'Brien

So, the reason people pay us is because it's a critically important ocean ecosystem that, if lost, has very negative downstream impacts. That's one reason. Another reason is that lots of governments around the world have implemented laws that restrict your ability to damage this plant. 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. We have contracts in Western Australia, Florida, and Virginia, and they're all for these general reasons: either compliance-driven restoration or voluntary-led restorations.

Shaan Puri

Sam, I put "How important is seagrass?" into ChatGPT. Here's what I said: Seagrass is wildly important to the world. It captures carbon **35 times faster than rainforests**, which I think he mentioned. It’s like a **baby crib for the ocean**. Seagrass is where small fish, crabs, seahorses, and even endangered species like turtles are born and live early on in their lives. If we lose seagrass, then we would lose entire marine ecosystems.

Will O'Brien

Yeah.

Sam Parr

Well, what's crazy is... you okay? The mission check, like onboard, amazing. Did you kind of skip the headline? Sean, did we? He built a robotics business. In the first year, I think you said you only raised $2,000,000 or something like that. So, with only $2,000,000 in funding in your first eighteen months of business, you did a million in revenue. Is that right?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, and just five people as well.

Shaan Puri

Is there something new about building a robotics company today that lets you do it way cheaper? Did something change, like, oh, we all use whatever?

Sam Parr

You know.

Shaan Puri

It's like when the Raspberry Pi came out. Then it's like, "Oh, we can now have this little computer for $35 or whatever." Is there something that has made it a lot cheaper? Or maybe just that there's more talent? What's changed?

Will O'Brien

3D printers have been huge; they're a game changer. It means the speed of iteration has gone up massively. It's easier now to get parts overnight as well, and to get sheet metal. The cost of a lot of things has gone down significantly, especially with the advent of electric vehicles. Batteries have decreased in cost massively, and many electronic components, like motors for drones, have also become much cheaper. For us, a critical enabler of what we do is Starlink. The way our system works is that we have this autonomous boat, which is like a surface vehicle—our mother ship. Then we have a docking system that releases these daughter robots, which are autonomous underwater vehicles, to perform the critical activities in the ocean that we want to accomplish. We wouldn't be able to communicate with these assets without something like Starlink. Previously, we had Iridium, but the bandwidth on that wasn't strong enough. So, we have other kinds of navigation features as well.

Shaan Puri

That company you were talking about, Saildrone, has raised over a hundred million dollars. It looks like they're valued between $500 million to $1 billion. That's interesting. There's another one called Saronic. Do you know Saronic?

Sam Parr

No, how do you spell it?

Shaan Puri

Saron, I think you probably know a little bit more about this company than I do. I believe Joe Lonsdale seeded this company, right?

Sam Parr

Yes, yeah. God, this looks sick as well.

Shaan Puri

So, like, when we had Joe on the podcast and I was at his house, he was telling me about this company. I should have just invested on the spot. But he was basically like, "We're building drones for the water." Yeah, and you know, drones for defense, just like Anduril is doing it for the sky. Modern warfare has turned into drone-based operations. They're building these unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) for the ocean. And they talked about how, did you know this? Like, the U.S. Navy... Sam, just take a guess. How many ships are in the U.S. Navy fleet? Just what's the number?

Sam Parr

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

Shaan 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.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Sure.

Sam Parr

Oh my god.

Shaan Puri

But only 300? That's just a very small number to me. We have 67 submarines.

Sam Parr

That's it.

Shaan 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 pull this up. I think they're like... will correct me if I'm wrong, but the average cost of these is something like... or maybe Savage crossed these contracts, like $250,000,000 every time you get a contract to do one of these. And so, you're a startup like Anduril, and all you have to do is basically say, "Alright, we're gonna come in, we're gonna build the most innovative autonomous vehicles here, and we're gonna operate." You know, what Anduril did was remarkable. So, what Anduril did was, in Silicon Valley, the smartest tech people, nobody was working on defense. Google had famously shut down its defense project, and defense was taboo. Like, you're gonna make weapons? That was not cool at the time. There were basically zero weapons startups in San Francisco. What they did was say, "We're gonna do this. We're gonna use the Silicon Valley method and talent to do this. We're gonna change the cost structure." All the big defense primes were operating on what's called a cost-plus model. 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 sort of screwed up, and that's how you get, you know, a single airplane that's like a billion dollars or something like that to get paid. 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. Then Anduril comes out—Paul Malachy, Trey, and others—they basically came out and said, "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." They've built now a $20 to $30 billion company doing this. The reason I find this exciting is that I love these huge opportunities that are hidden in plain sight. I talked to a friend recently who knew Elon, and I said, "What was Elon like? Were you impressed with Elon?" He goes, "I was impressed with Elon, but not because he was the smartest guy in the room. You know, we would be at a party, there's 20 people, you couldn't say, 'Oh my God, that's the guy.'" He goes, "But the thing that Elon did better than everybody else was that he 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." He goes, "The beautiful part about Elon is that he saw those, and he didn't ignore it like the rest of us. That idea of 'let's go to Mars' was there. It was available to all of us, and we were all blind to it." So, similarly, I think Anduril did that in the defense space, and now it looks like Saronic is basically doing that in the ocean defense space, where you have this combination of elite talent in robotics, AI, and autonomy, and you pair it with this old industry. I think you have a pretty unique window to build a very big company doing this.

Will O'Brien

Yeah, like they're building... I think of it like they're building the Humvees, and we're building the Toyota Hiluxes. They're creating these ultra-fast, defense-focused vehicles, and they're going to make the South China Sea a hellscape, making China want to cross that ocean and keep Taiwan safe if they keep going on the path they're on. They're doing an incredible job at that. We occupy a different niche. We just want every single day-to-day task that is done at sea to be completed on our platform. We want all the servicing done by Ulysses platforms and these sorts of things. There are a lot of factors making the ocean very important in this century, more than in previous ones. Warfare is a good example. Every other war we've fought in the last three decades has been in a desert. Now, we're going to the ocean, which requires a complete retooling of the military. Just even how we think about warfare fundamentally needs to change. The climate question is ultimately an ocean question. The ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink; it is where most of the life on Earth lives. It is one of our biggest sources of food in a world where the population is growing and food scarcity is always a concern. If you look at AI, the data infrastructure build-out for AI is going to be enormous. That's going to require more data infrastructure, i.e., cables connecting different parts of the world to transmit data. We're going to need more data centers and more energy. These are all things we're already testing, putting data centers in the ocean. The cooling costs go down massively, and they become more efficient.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

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

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

So, a lot of the initial infrastructure build-out for it in the ocean came from telecom companies, actually.

Sam Parr

Yeah, like in the eighties, Sean, there were a handful of telecom companies that were startups. They were 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...

Shaan Puri

Did they die, or what happened then?

Sam Parr

So, a lot of them are still running. If you look at some of the biggest frauds on Earth, it's like Bernie Madoff, and then the third one is actually one of these telecom companies that was laying pipes in the ocean. A lot of them are still around; they're just like small B2B companies that you wouldn't even know about. But they can be like a $10 billion a year company. In the eighties, right? Well, maybe you know this, but in the eighties, that was like the birth of a lot of this, wasn't it?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, yeah, yeah, massively. Now you're seeing a transition to the build-out coming from FAANG [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google]—from big tech. Soon, I think it'll be like the AI companies.

Shaan Puri

So what you're saying now is that AI companies need these data centers, just huge amounts of GPUs in a data center. Those data centers need cooling, they need power, they need tons of things, and ideally, they need to be close to places where people are using them. 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. Who's doing that? Is this a future idea? And why are they doing that? Why is that a good idea?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, so I think the first experiment of this was a Microsoft project. They did it. There's a YC startup as well, run by friends of mine, Sam Mendel. He's got a company called Network Ocean. They're building and starting to operate these things.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

The plan is for it to be subsea. Again, 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 inspections done, they are coming to us. We're selling them a kind of "in the box" solution. I think the biggest opportunity in this paradigm, in the future where more and more data cables are being laid subsea, is actually in the protection of them. I don't know if you guys are familiar with what's going on in the Baltic Sea, but I think in the last year, about 11 cables have been caught by foreign actors. And, you know, basically the kind of...

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

And, like, okay, literally, the Chinese are publicly advertising these cutters that they have—these cable cutters. They're literally putting it in the South China Morning Post: "China unveils powerful deep-sea cable cutter; could reset their alert." They're not even hiding this! They're calling the cables, and they're like, "Look how big our cable cutter is!" This is just like the new paradigm. Then, you know, they send these little Taiwanese ships or these Chinese ships into the Baltic Sea on, like, fishing missions. Right? What the hell are they doing in the Baltic Sea on fishing missions? They're clearly just cutting cables. And then, like, two days later, oh, cable cut. I wonder if...

Sam Parr

Dude, calling this a cable cutter is like calling a robot a ship. You know what I mean? Like, maybe technically it's correct, but they need to rebrand this because what you're showing us is basically like a huge submarine. You know, I'm thinking of like a clip.

Shaan Puri

It's not scissors.

Sam Parr

Yeah, this is insane.

Shaan Puri

So, they're going down and they're cutting this. What does that do? Like, does a country lose internet or is it just damaging it?

Will O'Brien

Okay, I'll give you this vision. These cables run between military bases as well, right? Let's say there's a hot war that breaks out in the South China Sea. The first target is going to be a military base in the Pacific, somewhere like Guam. What if you want to completely scramble their understanding and situational awareness of what is going on? You are going to be sending these subsea drones down there to cut the cables that are providing them with communications and energy. You're also going to be scrambling their airwaves with electromagnetic interference. That's how you're going to completely prevent American military responses in the Pacific, right?

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

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

Shaan 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?

Will O'Brien

No, no, not at all. They're very difficult to lay right, and you need to respond quickly. There are many critical things that rely on them, but yeah.

Shaan Puri

You're way better off defending them with unmanned water drones than trying to lay backup pipes down there and leave them undetected. You'd be...

Will O'Brien

Persistently out at sea, like century style, in the same way that Anduril started with these border systems to see what was coming in over the land border. We need the exact same type of systems out at sea, permanently just sitting there on top of them. They need to be cheap so that you can deploy them massively at scale. You know, 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 below the surface. Fundamentally, that's like the platform that we've developed. We have this surface vehicle with a docking system that can drop a number of water vehicles, and we've made it all about ten times cheaper than anyone else. So, that's, you know, Searass is like a nice place where we started, but...

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

So, for the Baltic Sea, I mean, it's one of the shallower seas. This is like a major area of activity where this is going on right now. Our vehicle works in that sea at all depth profiles. For the Baltic Sea part of it, it works well. However, when you get into the gnarlier parts of the ocean, like some areas of the Pacific where you're getting down to about 8,000 meters—right, like Mount Everest levels of depth—we can't go there yet. It just started getting difficult. But, yeah, we will be adding future vehicles to the fleet that can handle that.

Sam Parr

How old are you?

Will O'Brien

I'm 27.

Sam Parr

Sean, when you and I moved to San Francisco—well, I moved there in 2012—and we're about the same age, it was the sharing economy that was the thing. So, it was Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft that were the winners. Then there were a bunch of derivative things, like Airbnb for garages or for storage. A few years later, it was AI or crypto. So, like Bitcoin and Coinbase were winners, and then there were a bunch of silly things. Right now, this is so strange to me; it's AI, but it's also... well, it's whatever category you guys would go in. You're not quite defense tech, but it's 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 was like, "This is foolish. What are you guys doing? We're technology; this is a technology city. Why don't you do software?" To hear you say this, it's so foreign to me. It's also so interesting.

Will O'Brien

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

Shaan Puri

We ate it separately.

Sam Parr

Way to...

Shaan Puri

like

Sam Parr

How many more CRMs are there?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. It's like the...

Will O'Brien

The boomers got cheaper real estate. You guys got like B2B staff, right? That's like... and now it's on us to do something where the next frontier is, which is fundamentally hardware. Also, it's a no-brainer. You look at the top 10 most valuable companies in the world right now, and it's like seven out of ten of them have a hardware component. The biggest companies being built today are hardware companies. In a world where you can just vibe code overnight, like a CRM or a Calendly competitor—maybe not Salesforce—but is there really a moat in these sorts of things anymore? It's like, oh yeah.

Sam Parr

You're right. You're absolutely right. I think it's so fascinating because when Sean and I lived in San Francisco, if someone who looked like you—you're wearing a Ford Bronco shirt, I bet you're wearing cowboy boots, and you've got a little bit of swag to you—if you were to talk about what you're talking about, it would have been like you're so out of touch. You're out of touch for the YC group of out-of-touch people. It's just so interesting to me, and I think it's great.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

No.

Shaan Puri

About technology and Windows, he basically says, "Alright, there's a reason—there's almost like a scientific reason—why what you just described happens." He explains that when a wave of startups emerges, it's typically due to a technological change. For example, when we first moved to San Francisco in 2012, the mobile window was open. That's when companies like Instagram, Uber, and Snapchat were built, all relying on having a computer with you at all times that had an internet connection, an accelerometer, and GPS features. However, that window opens for a very fixed amount of time. As you mentioned, the low-hanging fruit gets eaten. He went back to the railroads and noted that the railroad technology window was open for forty years. After that period, there were no more successful railroad companies because all the opportunities had been taken. For automobiles, the window was twenty-five years. During that time, you had companies like Buick, Dodge, Ford, Cadillac, GM, Chevrolet, Lincoln, and Chrysler all emerge within a short span. Then, there was nothing for about eighty years until the window reopened due to battery technology, leading to the rise of Tesla and Rivian. This represented a new technology window around automobiles because the tech had changed again with batteries. He mentioned that B2B SaaS has had a twenty-year window, and now AI software, starting in 2016, represents the current window we are in. I would say what Will is doing, along with many smart entrepreneurs, is operating within the technology window of AI, robotics, and 3D printing. These three technologies have opened the door to build new things that couldn't have been created ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. This is what a technology window looks like. If you're on audio, you have to be on YouTube to see this, but I'm sharing my screen here. It basically outlines the following steps: 1. The technology is invented, and only hobbyists are playing with it out of interest and creativity. 2. The status moment occurs when one of the hobbyists achieves status and wealth using the tech. For example, Marc Andreessen appeared on the cover of *Time* barefoot because the hobbyist internet guy became rich by building the browser. This happened again with social networking and with figures like Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, who had their status moments. Palmer was literally living in an RV, building VR headsets for $90 using spare parts. He was a hobbyist who gained wealth and status when he sold to Facebook for $3 billion. The same goes for Elon, who was building in relative obscurity. OpenAI was a nonprofit and relatively obscure for the first five years. Now, Sam Altman, Elon, and Palmer, along with Andrew, have had new status moments. Then there's what he calls knowledge diffusion. Suddenly, there are conferences, podcasts like this one, newsletters, and Twitter where people share ideas about what's going on. This leads to an explosion of activity, followed by competition flooding in. New incumbents are born, and the new incumbent regime takes over due to their defensibility. They build something that is defensible, perhaps because it's hardware, requires scale, or has a network effect. Eventually, the technology window closes—90% closed—and only a few exceptions remain from there on out.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

So yeah, I mean, like I said, I've been in the ocean, on the ocean, and near the ocean since I was a kid. I've been diving, surfing, wakeboarding, and doing all these sorts of things growing up. But I never really built anything in it before this. When the scooter-sharing startup thing popped off, I was working in that. My co-founders had all been tinkering with various projects, but again, none of us had ever actually done anything in the ocean. I actually think that's a massive benefit because none of us came in with preconceived notions about how subsea drones should work. Two of my co-founders were building aerial drones in a drone delivery startup before, so they took a lot of the principles from that. One of them had worked on self-driving cars and brought some ideas from that as well. But I think there's definitely this idea that I agree with: to really shake up an industry, it's probably good if you don't come from it. We approached it thinking we might use someone else's platform and repurpose it. However, when we looked at all the subsea drones on the market, they were subpar. They cost a lot; one of the ones we were considering, which actually had the specs we needed, cost around $500. That's like a quarter of our pre-seed funding just to do what we wanted. Then our CTO, Jamie, went into a cave for a few days and came back with a design for a new type of autonomous water vehicle. We tested it, and we were like, "Oh shit, this works!" It's like ten to twenty times cheaper than anything we could have bought. Sometimes, you just need a new idea and an artist to go into a cave, and then you can change things.

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

This is like... I mean, all religions have similar themes. Like, Mohammed went into the cave, and Jesus went into the desert. You know, all these prophets go off into the wild, and then they come back with a secret. Someone else spreads the word for them, right? It's like, yeah, you know, Saint Peter does it in the Catholic Church and others. So yes, this is a common archetype, and yeah, that does work.

Shaan Puri

You said something earlier about how a billion people rely on the sea for their food. Has anybody done anything interesting with food, like tuna or salmon? Are they doing anything innovative there, whether it's lab-grown or something else? Yeah, my friend's got a...

Will O'Brien

Very, very interesting startup called **Wild Type**, which is like sustainable sushi-grade salmon. So basically, that's cultivated seafood. Their first product... like their...

Shaan Puri

What do you mean by "cultivated"?

Will O'Brien

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

Shaan Puri

Like grown in a lab or grown in a different way.

Will O'Brien

Yeah, like in this industrial process, 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 a sports car, they're starting off with sashimi-grade salmon, the highest-end salmon to get. I've tried it, and it's great.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

Yes, exactly. It's like similar ideas. I mean, look, breweries are where so much of the best kind of biotech innovation has come from. It's about people building mass industrial processes for cultivating food for a very long time, in fact.

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

Holy shit.

Shaan Puri

Crazy to me.

Sam Parr

This is crazy.

Shaan Puri

Is it like the lab-grown meats where it's like $10,000 an ounce? It's like, we can either pick 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.

Will O'Brien

Well, I think given that my friend shared it with me, it's not that expensive. But it's...

Shaan Puri

You're not that good of friends.

Will O'Brien

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

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

What else is cool? Tell me everything! What are the guys like you into? Like, some more ocean stuff?

Will O'Brien

Some crazy ones, yes. Yeah, okay, alright, this one is wild, right? Buckle up. Okay, ocean treasure hunting. There are actually hundreds of wrecks out there in the ocean today that potentially have more than a billion dollars on them. We're talking about gold bullion that the Spanish were bringing back from their conquests, and then they got hit by a storm or these sorts of things. There are probably thousands of wrecks that have millions of dollars in them. The source governments, like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, still have claims on these treasures. However, there is precedent in history for profit-sharing agreements. It's like this: if we find the treasure and restore it, we give you back all your artifacts and everything, but we get to sell some of them and keep a portion. So, you can do this!

Shaan Puri

It's like these models where it's these SaaS negotiation companies that say, "Hey, if we go and save you money on your vendors..."

Sam Parr

Get a cut.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

So, my friend used to do this. His name's Chip Forsyth, and he would be like, "Hey, I'm going off the coast of whatever to go..."

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

Chip Forsyth, you know.

Shaan Puri

He went up the coast and just... what? Scuba dive? Or what was he doing?

Sam Parr

Was Chip and AJ Forsyth, who I think you've met? AJ is crazy, and his brother Chip. Basically, the way it works now is it's kind of like a movie. You have these crazy people, and you get other people to finance it. You say, "If we find this treasure, here's the agreement on how we split it." 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 right? Will, how it works now?

Will O'Brien

Pretty much, yeah. So, there's fundamentally two parts of a mission, or three parts. First, there's the **pre-mission** phase. This involves negotiating and looking through historical records to see where we think it could be. It's about scoping it out and getting permission so that when you do the recovery, you have a chance of being able to hold onto it. Then, there's the **scouting** phase. This is when you're actually on-site, doing the scouting, and using sonar to scan the embed and understand what's there. Finally, there's the **recovery** phase. This involves bringing out these gnarly JCB-style ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) that go down, dig it all up, and bring it back up. And then you have your party. That's it.

Shaan Puri

Is anybody doing this? Has anyone, you know, made like $10,000,000 finding treasures in the ocean?

Will O'Brien

I know some people working on this who haven't shared their plans publicly yet, so I won't share it. However, there are some exciting developments coming in this space that we may or may not be helping with.

Shaan Puri

Did you say there are 3,000,000 shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean?

Will O'Brien

So, I'm not sure about the total number of shipwrecks. I wouldn't be surprised if there are that many shipwrecks, but there are hundreds that potentially have billions on them.

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

So, there's... okay, I'll give you a banger quote. There's this Canadian billionaire named Ross who had this quote a few years ago. He said, "Give me a tanker of iron filings and I will give you an ice age." What he meant by that is you could actually alter the weather of the Earth by dunking iron into the ocean. Many parts of the ocean are low in iron; they need more iron. If you add iron to these parts of the ocean, you stimulate algae growth at the surface. Algae then draws down carbon, and then the fish eat it. When the fish die, they fall to the bottom of the sea, and the carbon goes from the air into the bottom of the ocean. This is generally good because we have too much carbon in the atmosphere, and we also want more fish. However, you need to balance it because you don't want to put in too much and then have an overpopulation of salmon, which could disrupt the ecosystem. When you're working with ecosystems, it's very difficult to predict how things are going to pan out, so you need to be careful. This dude didn't do that carefully. He went out off the coast of Vancouver, partnered up with some Native Americans, and conducted an experiment where he basically dumped a load of iron filings. Through his calculations, he removed thousands of tons of carbon, and that year, they had the biggest salmon catch ever off the coast as a result. However, the authorities did not like his experimentation. The Canadians, along with the CIA, busted into his home, and he ended up with a warrant. He got into a lot of trouble. Since then, people haven't really done it because he was kind of the first crazy hobbyist to do something like this at scale. I think there is going to be a billion-dollar company built in marine geoengineering of some description. I think... you know, I'm Catholic, so it's like...

Sam Parr

There's this... like a lot.

Will O'Brien

Of my beliefs around environmentalism and stuff like that, a lot comes from this Christian notion of stewardship. We should look after our lands and seas because it's our duty. I think this is where we're going with how we manage the climate. Climate used to be about avoiding the worst-case scenario. It was very much about stopping carbon emissions. However, I believe there's a more interesting idea of stewardship in environmentalism. We actually need to take control of the planet. For example, someone like Augustus, a rainmaker, can make it rain when we want it to rain. Someone like you, Aziz, can come in and bring back the seagrasses when we need them. When we want to draw down carbon or increase fish stocks somewhere, we can do a bit of that. I think we're going to have to build these tools because we need them in tandem with growing the size of the economic pie. We don't want to just shut down the economy or stop doing commissions altogether. It's important for us to have these compensatory mechanisms. I believe geoengineering is an interesting and underexplored space. The main things we need to get right there are better science, better technology, and governance. Governance is crucial because the ocean is a public space. We need to get the governance power right.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

**Incredible mullet! Oh my God!**

Sam Parr

Wow, this whole cohort of people, of which Will appears to be one of the class presidents, is very strange. They don't fit the stereotype that you think of when you think of a tech entrepreneur. They're kind of manly men, or they're not like the typical engineer thing that you and I grew up with, Sean. There's something about them that is different, and I can't tell if you guys are going to take over the world to be billionaires or if you're going to go broke. But it's only going to be one of the two. Do you understand, Sean? This new genre that I'm trying to describe? I don't know exactly what I'm saying. Will, maybe you can put words to it, but there's this new breed that I...

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

I think there's something emblematic about the evolution of the technology industry. We began as this kind of hippie movement, with people like Steve Jobs who were actualizing on the axis of the spiritual realm. Then you had people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, who were just nerds, actualizing on the sense of the mind. They were smart and nerdy. Now, we have people who are openly flexing, actualizing on the sense of the body. We're becoming strong, and there's this full integration of mind, body, and spirit. It's no wonder that technology is becoming fully actualized in all the areas a human needs to develop. This is happening at the exact same time where you have Elon Musk, who is like the chief tech bro in the White House. To me, these things are no coincidence. Tech has found its voice; it has found itself. It's self-confident and ready to actually change the world. It's spiritually aligned, mentally sharp, and now we have a strong group of people who are taking health and fitness seriously. This is why I think we're at the most interesting time in technology right now.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

No, it's a great movie.

Shaan Puri

And the final scene of *Ratatouille* features the critic, who is the most fearsome critic in all of the town, writing a review about the restaurant where the rat has been cooking. He delivers this beautiful monologue—maybe the most beautiful four minutes in all of film. I think you're up there with the last four minutes of *Ratatouille* with your mind, body, and spirit analogy for tech. I think that's kind of amazing. I've actually heard that before, just with the technology part of it. So, it's like you had the initial, you know, the "bicycle for the mind." You had Steve Jobs talking about how computers will enable creativity. Then you had AI, and it's like, "Oh, we gave computers a brain, and now they can think for themselves." With robotics and self-driving cars, it's like we gave the computers a body so they can move around, pick up things, and do things. I like how you extended that to the entrepreneurial will that has grown in that way.

Will O'Brien

Bezos and Zuckerberg, they're getting jacked. Like, they're doing TRT. They look like... I think that's true.

Sam Parr

Problematic of like...

Will O'Brien

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. What Jordy and John are doing there is like they're the technology brothers. They're leaning into the fact that they're tech bros. That used to be a slur, right? Now it's like, "Oh, I'm confident in it. I'm owning it." They're doing these hilarious promo videos with them sipping Dom Perignon. There's a confidence and an air of, "Okay, let's do it now." You know, we're not going to be at the events and functions anymore, kind of lying about what...

Shaan Puri

You're hearing, dude. Listen to this yourself.

Sam Parr

I got an email from this guy named Jamie at the Wall Street Journal. Jamie is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal's style team. He listened to this and said, "I'm writing a story about tech guys embracing western wear," so basically cowboy clothes in the past few years. I want to write about how the tech bro uniform has changed from quarter zips and Allbirds to denim shirts and cowboy boots. When I saw this and he said "tech bro," I was like...

Shaan Puri

Dude, that's amazing.

Will O'Brien

Like I...

Sam Parr

Don't think I could talk like this. This is academia.

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

Yeah, life wins! But I was like, "I'm not exactly in tech." That's amazing that you think that. I am a fashion influencer, officially. No, yeah.

Shaan Puri

"Mission accomplished!" Yeah, dude, that's amazing. And you're right. Like, is there any difference? Do you remember the first time you saw Zuck doing MMA? Is there any difference between that video and the first time you saw a Boston Robotics or Boston Dynamics robot dog getting kicked, jumping around, and doing backflips? There's no difference between the two videos. It's the same video.

Sam Parr

Days that everyone remembers where...

Will O'Brien

They were when they saw it.

Shaan 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.

Sam Parr

Will one of the last questions be, "Can I invest?" Yeah, yeah, great! Okay, cool. Because I think this is awesome. You guys are insane, man. This energy is so wild! I'm not convinced that it's going to end. On one hand, it goes both ways. There’s the hubris where, you know, you're like, in the case of Androl, you're Boeing or you're one of these huge companies, and you're like, "You know, Parker or Palmer, you know nothing." Just go back to...

Shaan Puri

It would be better if they called him **Parker**. "Parker," more condescending. "Little Parker, listen Parker."

Sam Parr

They would be like, "Palmer, you know nothing. You’re just... go back to making Facebook apps." And like, probably eight out of ten times, that idea is right. Right? Where there's an incumbent, and they fail because it's really hard. There are centuries of hard work to go against in competition. So that's the same with you and I, I would have to imagine. You have these young, really smart people who have no experience. Is this the 10% of the time where you guys are just going to take over the world? Or is this another time where someone's going to be like, "Look, this is exactly what I told you. It does not work."

Shaan Puri

Alright, listen. That guy, John, the one who said, "Give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age." Here's what I say: give me a hundred mullets and I'll give you a 10x portfolio. I just need... well, I need Augustus. I need Palmer with a mullet, right? Three mullets. I need 97 more mullets, and I'll give you a 10x return.

Will O'Brien

Okay, give me the phone.

Sam Parr

I'll find the mullet for you.

Shaan Puri

You find the mullets.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Oh, I definitely understand that feeling. Yeah, for sure. I am not qualified to judge the feasibility of something, but I think in general, it's not about any... you know, if 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 brainpower that was otherwise gonna be building X or working at Y company, you know, working at Facebook optimizing ad clicks or starting a company that was gonna be doing B2B HR software. Instead, now we peeled off a portion of that talent and sent, you know, a hundred mullets at these problems. I think that that's the winning strategy: a hundred or a thousand shots on goal like this, and then the winners will obviously emerge.

Will O'Brien

Well, I can assure you that 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 action, the door is always open. Sam, the same goes for you, champ.

Shaan Puri

I gotta ask you two quick questions. Number one, seagrass seems so random. When you started this company, you might have thought, "Oh, I'll do drones for warfare."

Will O'Brien

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

How did you arrive at the seagrass thing? Was it instant? Was that the initial idea, or did you do some discovery to it? It was the...

Will O'Brien

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

Shaan Puri

He heard about Searass on a surf trip.

Will O'Brien

From a marine biologist friend of his who is working on it.

Sam Parr

A guy out in the wave.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, dude, this co-founder is absolutely carrying your company.

Will O'Brien

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

He's Scott. You've built the tech and figured out the go-to-market.

Will O'Brien

Love it! Yeah, he's the one who found the kind of seagrass that brought us together. Then, myself and my other co-founders put it together and thought, "This is what the business should probably look like." From there, we kind of ventured into other areas. I think any brilliant company finds a local monopoly to build in first. It's somewhere where there's nobody else doing stuff with technology, where you've got a great time, and nobody's ever heard of what you're doing initially. You can tap into a pretty big market and bring cash into your business; it's like the lifeblood. So, it's been a great place for us to start—it's the best place for us to begin since nobody's ever heard of it. I think that's always a good place to start off on. Yes, we're going to use that as a kind of launching pad to do other interesting things in the ocean. Who knows?

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

Steve Irwin, probably.

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

Yeah, I know he's... I'm hopeful I can get the Erwin family on the Ulysses trainer at some point.

Sam Parr

We got to holler at Bindi Irwin.

Will O'Brien

That would be great, Robert.

Sam Parr

Well, I love those guys.

Will O'Brien

Yeah, Robert as well. You know, look, Steve, I think it's so funny. People say "Steve" on a podcast in the tech world, it's like Steve Jobs. For me, it's...

Sam Parr

Steve Irwin.

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

This well.

Sam Parr

There's this famous video of Steve Irwin and his wife. What's her name? I forget her name. Anyway, there's an interviewer who asked Steve, "Do you know, you don't seem like you care?"

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

There it is. Thank you.

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

This clip... play it. Play it.

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

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

Will O'Brien

Yeah, it's... it's... it's. And so I think the traits in him that I wear are just like the pure, raw passion. It's like this unbridled passion. It's like this nonsensical passion. It's like, you think I'm gonna have...

Shaan Puri

A conversation without a microphone? No! I'm going to put a microphone there. I'm going to record a podcast every day, and I don't give a rip who's listening because, you know what? I'm a podcaster, and I'm going to podcast my ass off!

Sam Parr

It's a whole lot more lame when you're not talking about saving the Earth, you know what I mean? Yeah, I tried. I tried, like, when we're talking about conversion rate optimization or B2B. Dude, in fact, my generation and the generation before me, we... you know what did they say? "Hard times create... or no, like we need hard men to create soft times." That's what I did for you. You know, we went and did the B2B software stuff so you guys could do this fun, amazing stuff. So really, you're welcome.

Will O'Brien

Thank you, thank you.

Shaan Puri

Can we do just a quick happy hour on two topics that you had on this list? Sam, if you gotta run or whatever, feel free. But I just gotta ask you about these. I want to do the fun one and then the spiritual one. The fun one is conspiracy theories. You're a big 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?

Will O'Brien

I think, well, I think it's like... a lot of the traits of conspiracy theorists are similar to those of a great founder. I think of someone who believes in something that everyone else tells them is not real or that they shouldn't believe in. These are people who are able to see patterns that others can't see. They just go down these rabbit holes. I think this contrarian spirit is very, very good. It's a very important trait. The default is doing things that other people do, so I think it's crucial to cultivate an ability to see the world differently. I think.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

I just think it's very important to, you know, have a weird idea and take it seriously. Right? Like, if we had just heard the "see your ass" idea and dismissed it, I don't know what the hell I'd be doing today. You need to take something weird and go with it. I don't blindly believe every report of telepathy or nonverbal autistic children, or every late-night UFO sighting, but I refuse to dismiss them outright. History shows us that breakthroughs often happen at the edges, where people are curious enough or foolhardy enough to investigate the unexplainable. Whether it's Christian mystics who swear by miraculous healings or physics experiments that challenge our understanding of space-time, I think it's very important to lean into these weird things and ask, "What if?" And yeah, I think conspiracy theories are just kind of fun as well. They're like horoscopes for dudes. So, if nothing else, they're just a fun thing to spend your time on.

Sam Parr

Your time reading about... on here, you talk about aliens. We were with Joe Gebbia recently, who's like the ninetieth richest person in the world. I was like, "Joe, look, you're worth like $10,000,000,000. If there's an Illuminati, you are either in it or you're friends with the people in it. Tell me one thing that you guys talk about." He looked at me and said, "Aliens are real." He went on a big diatribe about his passion for UFOs and aliens and how he absolutely is on board with them.

Will O'Brien

In 100%.

Shaan Puri

He's on board with them. What is that?

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

And the funny thing is, if you meet Joe, he's a serious dude. Joe doesn't just say wild stuff for wild stuff'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 very serious individual. So for him to say something like that, it's not like you discount it with the same discount rate you would if John McAfee was the guy saying it. You know what I mean?

Will O'Brien

If your reader is walking down this rabbit hole, the best website I recommend is one that a friend of mine runs: **uapevidence.com**.

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

I think it lies in a conspiracy, more like a wacky, weird rabbit hole. You need to go down and listen to the "Telepathy Tapes" podcast.

Shaan Puri

I have, and I love that.

Sam Parr

What is this? Is this like, I can read your mind?

Will O'Brien

So basically, there's this group of people that others have been calling crazy for the last two decades, right? It's primarily the teachers and parents of children with nonverbal autism. They have been convinced that their kids have been able to read their minds. Now, for the first time, with teaching kids how to spell on iPads and getting researchers in to study them, they're actually verifying these telepathic capabilities. For example, a mother will go into one room and be shown a random number generator. Meanwhile, her son, Akhil, in the other room, will hit the exact same three numbers 100% of the time consistently in tests. That's awesome! Yes!

Shaan Puri

It's like the Serial podcast, but it's this woman investigating these claims. She's, you know, like an NPR skeptic. Let me call it that. So she comes in and says, "This didn't make a ton of sense, but I'm open-minded."

Sam Parr

And she turned.

Shaan Puri

I didn't finish the whole thing. I listened to probably the first two or three, but I was listening while I was going to sleep, and I just had some wild, wild nights there. So I decided, "Alright, I need to only listen to this when I'm not falling asleep if I'm going to do this right." By the way, Will, did you walk away from that half convinced, three-fourths convinced, or totally convinced? What did you walk away with?

Will O'Brien

I was going into it already with some sort of priors. I thought that consciousness isn't local to the brain. We like to think that our brain is this kind of DVD player where consciousness is playing, and it's being played to us. That's how we experience things. I think we're more like... I always kind of thought, for different reasons, that we're more like a radio antenna. You know, you have these stories of people whose son dies in an accident, and they just know something's wrong. They just know, right? Every family has these stories about death or something bad happening, and they just knew. They woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep, and then the next day they hear about this awful accident or something like that. There's this knowingness and other phenomena, like telepathy—twin telepathy and stuff like that. There's a world of parapsychology, which is the study of these kinds of psi phenomena. There are a few very reproducible experiments in it, like the Ganzfeld experiment. If you allow me to go on this very short rabbit hole: the most reproducible experiment in this field is basically this: you take two people and put them in two separate rooms. These could be twins, a husband and wife, two artists, or two people who don't know each other in different settings. You give one person a picture, and they are the sender. The other person is the receiver, in another room. Let's say I get a picture of an elephant. For five minutes, I talk about elephants. I saturate my brain with Africa and wild animals in the savannah. You're in the other room, listening to white noise, and you're talking about what you're sensing and feeling that could be related to the picture. At the end of the five minutes, I stop, and you get replayed what you were saying to yourself for those five minutes. You also get four random images and get to pick one of the four. You would assume, if it were complete chance, that you would have a 25% chance of getting it right. But pretty consistently, you get around 30% or above in this experiment. When there are twins, husbands and wives, or artists, they actually score more consistently—35%, and in some instances, up to 70% in some of these experiments. So I've always kind of been primed to think that maybe we're touching into something. That explains a lot of the spiritual and "woo-woo" stuff. I can see this, and it's backed by very good experimental evidence that is really well done. I'm like, "Okay, no, that's legit." Our brain is not just this AI chip that runs and tells us what to do. It's like an AI chip, but it also has a radio antenna that can connect to other people, and maybe even connect to God, spirits, or other things we don't really know.

Sam Parr

Dude, I'm so bummed that I grew up in the B2B era of startups. Yeah, it's so bummed. Well, I wish I was ten years younger or you were ten. I wish we could've hung out.

Will O'Brien

Dude, let's grab some beers.

Shaan Puri

I went to a bachelor party this weekend. Everybody there was part of a joint celebration, where both the bachelors and the bachelorettes were together. The bachelorette side was so cool! Every single one of them had those tattoos that aren't filled in; they almost look like a pencil sketch.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, just seven or eight of those. Some piercings, a sense of style off the charts, and knowledge of beer and music way beyond my recognition. You know, sexuality was a total spectrum. I literally felt like I came from a... I was a caveman. Or like, you know, 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.

Sam Parr

That's awesome! That is so funny.

Will O'Brien

I think one universal law about technology is that it breeds variance. It creates skewed outcomes. You probably see this in younger generations as well. You've got weird, kind of schizo people like me who will burn your ear off with conspiracy theories and go down these strange rabbit holes. On the more negative end, that could send you down some pretty dark places where you might not be a productive member of society if you venture into those very dark corners of the internet. Similarly, you have people doing great things, but there's also an interesting question posed by technology right now: Where are the founders of billion-dollar companies who are under 25? This is an interesting question that still lacks satisfying answers. Previous generations had the Collison brothers early on, and we had Alexander Wang, who is maybe just a few years older than me, achieving success early as well. It still doesn't seem clear why there isn't a standout in this generation. Maybe we have to wait another year or two for companies like Ulysses or Rainmaker, or others, to reach that level. There is definitely a bigger skew in both the ideas that young people are interested in today, which I think is broadly downstream of technology.

Sam Parr

Are you going to become an American?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, I think I'm gonna... I'm on the green card path. Yep.

Shaan Puri

My last question was the spiritual one. You said you lived with Buddhist monks in Nepal for a summer and learned a lot. One thing I liked was when you said, "I couldn't come around to their view," which states that zero desires leads to enlightenment. You mentioned that you wanted to be action-oriented and do something with your life rather than just sit and renounce everything. Then you said something like, "I came to explain my five desires or six desires." Can you just give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at?

Will O'Brien

Yeah, so I just kind of wanted to share that I heard you could actually find a monastery that would put you up if you teach them English. So, I did that. I found a monastery in Nepal that would accommodate me. It's pretty rural, a few hours outside of Kathmandu. I flew there and taught myself how to teach English before I arrived. While I was there, I taught them English, and during my downtime, I was able to speak to some of the older monks who had good English. I asked them about their ideology because there's...

Shaan Puri

Just five monks with a thick Irish accent speaking English out there. They're like, "Yeah, I learned from an expert."

Will O'Brien

Wild actual segue! I was out running in the middle of Nepal one day and I bumped into a dude who was wearing a Galloway Bay 5K t-shirt. I was like, "Sorry, now you might have no English, but where did you get this t-shirt? This is like near where I'm from." He had kind of an Irish accent and said, "Oh, well, you know, I actually work with an Irish guy. He has an orphanage and a charity out here." I was like, "Oh wait, what's this Irish guy's name?" The Irish guy he named was the one Irish guy that my neighbor, who's like my mom's friend, mentioned. My mom was worried about me going to Nepal. She said, "Well, you need to have a contact in Nepal when you go over there." It turns out my neighbor knew a guy who was in Nepal and had a charity out there. Anyway, this random guy I met in this tiny village worked with him. So, this is like, you know, there are Irish people everywhere!

Sam Parr

Everyone is just talking. It's kind of like all these monks are like...

Shaan Puri

I boxed them. They're like, "You'll do nothing."

Sam Parr

I boxed the bullocks off them. Yeah, you'll do nothing. Literally.

Will O'Brien

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

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Alright, so... sorry. So, you go there and you're continuing.

Will O'Brien

Yeah, I'm curious about the region. I'm asking questions about it, but one thing I just couldn't get over was that they don't believe in desire. They believe desire is what leads to suffering. If you desire something, then you're creating a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you have that thing. I'm just like, "Dude, I'm very American Dream-pilled." I feel like I should want things. But I can see how that can go wrong as well, right? Because that leads to a "keeping up with the Joneses" type lifestyle. Or maybe, you know, kind of like the "fatties on the chair at Walmart" kind of thing. You know, that's probably when it goes too far. Hey.

Sam Parr

You better watch it, Will. It's our tip-off. You better watch what you're saying.

Will O'Brien

No, sir, you're not that fat. So anyway, I can see where I can go wrong, right? But I do think there was an essence of truth in there. It's like maybe you should actually try to trim down things as little as possible. I had this bizarre experience where I went to Everest Base Camp afterwards, and I was thinking a lot about the things that they were saying to me. Again, I feel like I had a download—one of those experiences where something just came into my brain that I hadn't been thinking about before. I genuinely think it was a download from something spiritual that gave me guidance on how I should proceed. It sounds crazy, but I was sitting on a rock, just taking a break during the ten-day hike up to Base Camp. I was thinking through it, and I thought, "Okay, if you have no desire, what do you do?" I thought, "Oh, maybe you should have the minimum amount of desires." Then I asked myself, "What is important to me?" I counted on my hand: my family, my friends, my health, my wealth, my craft. I realized, "Oh, shit, that's like five things. That's nice and clean." At the same time, I had this idea about a rose bush. If you leave rose bushes unkept, they grow briars and thorns, and the flowers don't really grow. You have to cut them back to let the energy go back to the roses. I had this very clear vision of roses, and I thought, "Okay, right. So this is it. Whenever I'm down about something, if it's not one of these five important things to me, then I should just let it go. Stop desiring it." I found that really helpful.

Sam Parr

To be helpful, you had a girlfriend, no?

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Saving the world... saving the world's seagrass. Former monk Sam's five desires are: family, health, wealth, fitness, and will. Those are Sam's five desires.

Sam Parr

This is so good, man.

Shaan Puri

You're the best, Will! This is awesome. People should check you out. Where on Twitter? You're Will O'Brien. What's your handle?

Will O'Brien

At Will O B R I W I L O B R I

Shaan Puri

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

Will O'Brien

Thank you, dude. Thank you.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's it. That's the pod. Thank you.