7 Wild Business Ideas for this $3 Trillion Dollar Frontier

MFM

That episode was a whirlwind

MFM

yeah we just recorded with our buddy will o'brien this episode was like my favorite conversations living in san francisco where you run into a weirdo who knows a lot about something you know very little about and like forty five minutes your mind gets blown like five times and you just get smarter so this is a get smarter episode for me

MFM

and it wasn't just about like the business and the ideas that he talked about but the mindset and how he thought about just like the philosophy of life that I was inspired by

MFM

yeah exactly so okay what are we talking about we're talking about how the ocean is the new space how there's companies like spacex and blue origin all these companies that are doing cool shit in space he knows a lot about companies that are doing cool things in the ocean which is something I honestly didn't know anything about going in now I'm pretty fascinated with but then we talked about the conversation toward the end gets really fun conspiracy theories why conspiracy theorists make for great founders his summer living with monks in nepal and what he took out of that it was the end is really good so get there to the end I promise you you will enjoy this episode alright what's up we got our friend will o'brien here and will is an irish guy who talks my ear off about the ocean and I honestly wasn't thinking about the ocean at all until I saw maybe a tweet of yours which was basically saying the ocean is the new space and how there's companies like spacex and others that have built huge hundred billion dollar + companies about exploring space about putting satellites in space about reusable rockets and that there's an opportunity for a similar wave of of disruption for startups in the ocean and I love that idea I honestly I'm never 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 kinda love the the theory and the the intellectual idea here of what is the opportunity and then if you're one of the rare few hardcore founders that can go do this you know this is gonna be right up your alley so that's my interest in it sam I'm curious from your perspective are you the same as me

MFM

dude I won't even go on a cruise ship like like I was at a party the other day and the the like one liner or the icebreaker was what something you're deathly afraid of to me it's being in the ocean to where I can't see land so like I I'm not even gonna be out there but yeah I I I agree with your premise

MFM

and will did I kinda frame your argument right as to like the potential that you see as far as you know the business opportunity of of building start ups that are are focused on on the ocean

MFM

yeah yeah absolutely yeah I think like yeah the framing is like you know something like this it's like you know you know everyone is like here standing on earth like looking looking towards the stars and and absolutely we we you know we should be doing that and we should be going like you know full pelt with like trying to go interplanetary trying to put a base on the moon and take you know take the take the dark side of the moon and then you know go from there and use that as a landing. To go to mars and we should be trying to fly supersonic as well but then look if you're if trying to build a startup like you're always asking yourself like where you know what is everyone else looking to do and like what where where is everyone else going and where is like underrated and I suppose you know I grew up by by the seaside and like the in the in the southwest of ireland I've always been obsessed with the ocean if I wasn't like on it in it or near it growing up you know there was there was there was something something wrong in the same way that you're you're afraid some of it yeah I'm I'm kind of like when I'm when I'm away from it I I feel something wrong with me and so I've always been been thinking about it and I mean if you just like look at it in like you know fundamental terms like the ocean economy right now is like already massive it's not like you know the future space economy is gonna be massive like the the ocean economy is massive it's like $3,000,000,000,000 in like annual spend in different ways right it covers like 70% of the planet 3,000,000,000 people rely on it as their primary source of food a billion as their as their primary source of income and then you know while we have like you know robots on mars and you know these like low cost drones going in our skies the technology like in our oceans like still pales in comparison like you know you look at like the ships that are out there today like much of the technology is like very same and similar to like what we had years ago the unmanned you know underwater drones are like you know pretty much like the same as well there like the the kind of key core technology stacks supporting like the the key pillars of the ocean whether it be transport fisheries defense energy you know biodiversity all these areas it's just like it's the same old like stagnant incumbents large scale incumbents offering solutions that you know are rolling on like ancient software and there's just like very little innovation going on there it's like you know you you you ask someone like what is like a sexy ocean startup and it's like they're kinda scratching their heads for a bit you know whereas if you ask them about space it's like spacex straight away it's like you know it straight away it's like you ask them about aerospace it's like ah boom so yeah this is like the kind of like the the core of the thesis

MFM

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

MFM

yeah like aye aye let's go so sam he's just said a bunch of stats so which of those surprised you so I'm just gonna rattle a couple back he said alright this one probably doesn't surprise you 70% of the earth earth is covered in in water I think only 25 has ever been explored he said a billion people rely on the ocean for their primary source of income 3,000,000,000 as their diet explain that what what what's the diet and the jobs one of the income one

MFM

oh it's just like people like you know most of I mean the human societies generally settle along coastlines like this is like a very like common trend

MFM

yeah but I'm in new york but I don't eat fish every day

MFM

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

MFM

alright so what were some other stats sean that caught your eye

MFM

a billion people rely on it for their income so what are the jobs that you're talking about here so are you talking about fisheries shipping is it like defense like what is that the are those the big three or am I missing something big and obvious

MFM

the the framing for me how I think about like the ocean economy is like you you generally kinda break it up into like three categories right like you have like the biosphere right which is like your fisheries it's your like ecosystem restoration it's like your environmental mapping it's science in the ocean it's like all around like biosphere management then you have like you know the the kind of prosperity oriented part around it this is like the kind of commercial this is like your energies your infrastructures your oil and gas it's your like data infrastructure you know these sorts of things it's your like logistics shipping and then you have like you know keeping the the seas safe which is like defense defense and security border security critical infrastructure protection deploying ships in the south china sea these sorts of things

MFM

alright a few episodes ago I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and to explain and that's what I'm about to do so I told you guys how I use chat gbt as a life coach or a thought partner and what I did was I uploaded all types of amazing information so I uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that I like issues going on in my personal life and businesses I uploaded so much information and so the output is that I have this gpt that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life like how should I respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so I worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that I use to make this the information that I had chat gbt ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like I said I use this like 10 or 20 times a day it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and 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

MFM

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

MFM

yeah I mean there's you know a lot of these kind of like you know legacy players on like shipbuilding and like unmanned systems and these sorts of things I think one player that's like interesting in the online systems space that's been around for for a long time I think over a decade now and was really kind of one of the first players to start doing interesting new things in the ocean is saildrone

MFM

what what problem are they solving what does saildrone do

MFM

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

MFM

they look amazing yeah they look awesome

MFM

they they build these like huge vessels that massive sailboats that can basically stay at sea for many many months at a time you can put a load of you know fancy sensors on them you know that can take data from the water that can you know gather video footage at the surface and these sorts of things and then relay them back to someone like in the united states it might be like a state a government agency like noaa who wanna know how much fish is in the in in the in the alaskan in the seas off alaska they could sell it to the us navy to know you know how deep is the waters in and around guam or something like that and then they yeah they sell these things as a service but you know they're they're very interesting founder there you know seems like a super sharp guy who's been obsessed with sailing for decades again like a lot of these ocean founders that you see they're very very obsessed with the ocean it's the very thing thing people very often get obsessed about and then try to make a business out of it

MFM

what's your what's your business do will what's ulysses ulysses or ulysses

MFM

ulysses yeah yeah yeah ulysses ulysses we're building a general purpose autonomy platform for for maritime operations

MFM

say that like we're stupid

MFM

just like just pretend pretend that we're stupid

MFM

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

MFM

autonomous robots for the ocean to do to do important things

MFM

okay and what what's one important thing that you would do you would like for example you would go to a pipe in the ocean and determine if it's got a hole in it

MFM

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

MFM

our stuff% a year of this thing is going away

MFM

okay why is

MFM

it dying is it because pollution or what what what's the cost

MFM

yeah there's like a few there's a few few few things I mean water quality is like a very common you know cause for loss other things are just like construction construction around like coastlines digging it up dredging you know changing ocean temperatures changing like ocean currents these sorts of things impact it and and and and basically you know the the kind of context there is there's a lot of governments in around all over the world like really really panicking around this like if they lose their seagrasses they lose their fish stocks if they lose their fish stocks you have the 1,000,000,000 people who rely on it and 3,000,000,000 people who you know rely on it for food and and the billion people for income and you know they're they're in a they're in a tough situation and basically restoring it I e bringing it back is currently a very manual process

MFM

and how and how are you guys doing that

MFM

we're but we build autonomous robots to do it

MFM

and you're actually building the robots yourself or when you said you're building a platform I thought that meant you're allowing other people to build it and use your technology to like track them

MFM

yeah so for this first use case we've built where we've built a kinda custom robotic payload you know like when you're when you're starting and trying to do something new it's kind of important to to kind of get you know initial traction in a weird place and I think if we just build something and hope that people would use it for for something if we just build the platform which is like an underwater vehicle and a surface vehicle that that in that dock together you know we might have trouble getting traction but we started off with this initial use case we've we basically built these like attachments that go onto our underwater vehicle that do collecting seeds planting seeds measuring their growth to kinda get this initial traction so you know in our first year we did a million dollars in in revenue just kinda like 12 you know first first year five peep person team based here in san francisco

MFM

why would someone pay you to do this

MFM

so the reason people pay us is because it's you know it's a critically important like ocean ecosystem that you know if lost has these like very negative downstream impacts yeah that's like you know one reason another reason is like lots of governments now around the world have implemented laws that restrict your ability to damage this plant if you or if you damage it you have to pay someone to plant it so they're paying us to plant it it's compliance driven restoration so that's the kind of contract we have contract in western australia we have a contract in florida we have a contract in virginia and they're all kind of for like these general reasons either compliance driven restoration or voluntary led restorations

MFM

sam I put how important is seagrass into chattgpt here's what I said seagrass is wildly important to the world and it basically says it captures carbon 35 times faster than rainforests which I think he said and then it says it's like a baby crib for the ocean the seagrass basically is where small fish crabs seahorses and even endangered species and turtles they're born and they live early on in their life and if lost then you would entire it says lose the seagrass and entire marine ecosystems collapse

MFM

yeah

MFM

well what's crazy is you okay the mission check like onboard amazing do you kinda skip the headline sean did we he he built a robotics business set in the first year you've only I think you 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

MFM

yeah and just five people as well

MFM

is there something new about building like a robotics company today that lets you do it way cheaper like did something change like oh we all use whatever

MFM

you know

MFM

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 does that's made it a lot cheaper or maybe just that there's more talent what what's changed

MFM

three d printers has been huge like that's just like a game changer it means just like the speed of iteration has gone up massively it's you know it's easier now to get parts overnight as well and just like get like sheet metal sheet metal cod and the cost of a lot of things has gone down like massively as well like with like the advent of like electric vehicles batteries kinda went down massively and a lot of electronic components with drones the motors went down massively in cost you know for us as well like a critical enabler of what we do right is starlink because you know the way our system works is like we have this like autonomous boat it's like a surface vehicle this is like our mother ship and then we have a docking system that releases these these daughter robots these like autonomous underwater vehicles to do the actual critical activity in the ocean that you wanna do and you know we wouldn't be able to communicate with these assets without something like starlink you had iridium before but like the bandwidth on that wasn't that strong so you have like other like kinda ynav features like

MFM

that and that company you were talking about saildrone they've raised like over a hundred million dollars it looks like they're valued 500 to a billion dollars that's that's interesting there's another one called saronic sam do you know saronic

MFM

no how do you spell it

MFM

s a r o n I c and will you probably know a little bit more about this company than me I think this joe lonsdale seeded this company right

MFM

yes yeah god this looks sick as well

MFM

so like when we had joe on the podcast and I was at his house he was telling me about this company should have just invested on the spot but he was basically like we're we're building drone like drones for the water yeah and you know drones in the for defense just like anduril's doing it for the sky and and you know modern warfare has turned into to drone base they're building these unmanned surface vehicles usvs for the ocean and they talked about how did you know this like the us navy sam just take a guess how many ships are in the us navy fleet just what's the number

MFM

oh I don't know 500 what I it's hard to even say a hundred

MFM

so okay so you're a lot closer than I thought I would have guessed that we have thousands of ships we have 300 ships in the navy

MFM

is a ship considered like an aircraft carrier because those are huge right those are like cities

MFM

sure

MFM

but oh my god

MFM

but only 300 that's just like a very small number to me and we have 67 submarines

MFM

that's it

MFM

67 dude I had more kids at my three year old birthday party that's insane to me so we got 300 ships or whatever and basically every ship is like I don't know the exact cost of it but let me let me pull this up I think they're like will correct me if I'm wrong but like the average cost of these is something like or maybe savage crossed these contracts like $250,000,000 every time you get contract to do one of these and so you're a startup like ceramic and you're 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 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 and it was there was basically zero zero weapons startups in san francisco and what they did was they said 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 so all the big defense primes were operating on what's called cost + model and so their incentive really was to have really high cost operations because they were making 10% on top of whatever the cost was right so the incentive model 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 to get paid and so it was costing the government a lot these guys had no incentive to innovate no incentive to cut costs and they were using talent that was not the smartest engineering talent in the world which was all centered in silicon valley and then andro comes out paul malachy and trey and others they basically came out and what they said was we believe this is important we believe that america needs this and we believe we should put the best talent in the world on this problem and they've built now a 20 to $30,000,000,000 company doing this and the reason I find this exciting is that I love these huge opportunities that are hidden in plain sight I talked to a friend recently who knew elon and I said what was elon like were you impressed with elon he goes I was impressed with elon but not because he was the smartest guy in the room you know we would be at a party there's 20 people you couldn't say oh my god that's the guy he goes but the thing that elon did better than everybody else was that elon looked down at the ground and saw a trillion dollar opportunity that was just sitting there you know before elon it's not like there were a bunch of people trying to build you know rocket companies or electric car companies it wasn't like they were trying and failed and he succeeded they weren't even trying and he goes the beautiful part about elon is that he saw those and he didn't ignore it like the rest of us any that that idea of let's go to mars was there it was available to all of us and we were all blind to it and so similarly I think anduril did that in the defense space and now it looks like saronic is basically doing that in the the sort of ocean defense space where you know you have this combination of elite talent at robotics and ai and autonomy and you pair it with this old industry and I think you have a pretty unique window to build a very big company doing this

MFM

yeah like they're they're building I I I think of it like they're building the humvees and we're building the toyota hiluxes right like they're building like these like ultra fast like defense focused like vehicles and like they're you know gonna make the south china sea a hellscape and make china now wanna cross that that that that ocean and keep taiwan safe if they keep going on the path they're doing and they're doing like incredible job at that and then we have we we occupy like a different niche like we're like we just want like every single like you know day to day task that is like done at sea we want we want it done like on our platform and so like we want like all the servicing done by like ulysses platforms and these sorts of things there's like a lot of things that are making the ocean like very important in this century more than previous ones like warfare is a good example like every other single war we fought in the last like three decades until now has been in like in a desert right now we're going to the ocean that requires a complete retooling of the military you know and just even how we think about warfare is fundamentally needs to change like the climate question is ultimately an ocean question like the ocean is like the world's largest natural carbon sink it is like where most of the life on earth lives it is you know one of our biggest sources of like food in a world where like a population is growing and food scarcity is always a question there's you know even just like you look at ai right like the data infrastructure build out for ai is going to be like enormous right and basically that's gonna require more data infrastructure I e like cables connecting different parts of the world transmitting data we're gonna need more data centers we're gonna need more energy these are all things like we're we're already putting and testing putting data centers in the ocean the cooling costs go down massively they become like more efficient

MFM

so will let's let's go back so there's there's already pipes under the ocean that basically like internet pipes under the ocean correct

MFM

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

MFM

and who built that is that the government built that or Google built that who who put that who put those pipes in the ocean to do that

MFM

so a lot of the initial infrastructure build out for for for it in the ocean came from telecoms companies actually

MFM

yeah like in the eighties sean tell so there's a handful of telecom companies that were start ups and they are 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

MFM

did they die or what happened then

MFM

so a lot of them are still running and then there was a some of the you know if you look at like what are the biggest frauds on earth like it's like bernie madoff and then like the third one is actually one of these telecom companies that was laying pipes in the in the in the ocean but a lot of them are still around they're just like small b or they're not small but they're b to b companies that you wouldn't even know but they can be like a 10,000,000,000 a year company but in the eighties right will or maybe you I don't know if you know this but but in the eighties that was like the the birth of a lot of this wasn't it

MFM

yeah yeah yeah massively and and and now you're seeing a transition to the build out being coming from faang from like big tech and soon I think it'll be like the the ai companies

MFM

so what you're saying will now is that ai companies need these data centers just you know huge amounts of gpus in a data center and those data centers need cooling they need power they need tons of things and they need to ideally they need to be close to places where people are using it and what you're saying is that somebody's gonna build a data center in the ocean or people are already building data centers in the ocean and who's doing that or is this a future idea and why are they doing that why is that a good idea

MFM

yeah so I think the first experiment of this was a Microsoft Microsoft project they did it there's a yc startup as well run by friends of mine sam mendel he's got a company called network ocean they're building and operating starting to building and operate these things

MFM

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

MFM

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

MFM

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

MFM

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

MFM

like if you say cable we're not talking like like a rope that you're pulling it's like a yeah it's like a tunnel right yeah

MFM

and and like okay like literally the the like the chinese are literally publicly advertising these cutters that they have these cable cutters right they're literally putting in the south china morning crest china unveils powerful deep sea cable cutter could reset their alert they're not even they're not even fucking hiding this like they're they're calling the cables they're like like yeah we're just look how big our cable cutter is like this is just like the new paradigm and then like you know they send these like little like you know taiwanese ships into the or these chinese ships into the baltic sea on like fishing missions right like what the hell are they doing in the baltic sea on fishing missions like they're clearly just cutting cables and then like two days later oh cable cut I wonder if

MFM

dude calling calling this a cable cutter is like calling a robo a ship you know what I mean like maybe technically it's it's correct but they need to rebrand this because what you're showing us is basically like a huge submarine you know like I'm I'm thinking of like a clip

MFM

it's not scissors

MFM

yeah this is insane

MFM

so they're going down and they're cutting this and what does that do like does a country lose internet or is it just like I mean damage it

MFM

okay I'll I'll give you this vision right so these cables run between like military bases as well right and okay let's say there's like a a hot war breaks out in like the south china sea right first target then is gonna be like a military base in like the pacific somewhere like guam right what if you if you want to like completely scramble what you know their understanding of and situation awareness of what is going on you are gonna be laying sending these subsea drones down there to go and cut the cables that is giving them like comms that's giving them energy and you're gonna be like scrambling their airwaves with like you know electromagnetic interference and that's how you're gonna like just completely prevent like american military responses in the in the pacific right

MFM

but how many how many cables like I'm we're you're talking to two dummies how many cables does america rely on

MFM

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

MFM

I'm so impressed that you knew that number that's insane to me so there there's not a lot of redundancy you're saying

MFM

no no not at all like they're they're very difficult to lay right and you need to respond quickly right and you need to respond quickly so yeah like I mean there's like many critical things that rely on them but like yeah

MFM

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

MFM

persistently out at sea like century style in the same way that like anduril like have the you know started with these like border you know systems to like see what was coming in and over like the land border like we need the exact same type of systems out at sea like permanently just sitting there on top of them they need to be cheap so that you can deploy them massively at scale you know you can't have the ocean is huge so they need to be cheap to be scalable you need to be able to see what's going on at the surface and you need to be able to see what's going on so surface and that fundamentally that's like the platform that we've developed we have this like surface vehicle with a docking system that can drop a number of water vehicle and we've made it like all by 10 times cheaper than anyone else so like that's you know searass is like a nice place where we started but

MFM

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

MFM

so for the baltic sea I mean it's one it's one of the shallower season this is like a major the major kinda like you know activity or area of activity where this is going right now so our our vehicle works in that sea you know at all depth profiles in that sea so for the baltic sea part of it it is it works when you get into like gnarlier parts of the ocean like some of the pacific where you're getting down to like 8,000 meters right like mount everest you know levels of depth we can't go there yet it just started getting difficult but like yeah or we will be adding future vehicles to the fleet that can that can be how

MFM

old are you will

MFM

I'm 27

MFM

sean so when you and I moved to san francisco in well I moved there in '12 and we're about the same age it was the sharing economy that was the thing so it was airbnb and uber and lyft were the winners and then there was a bunch of derivative things like airbnb for garages or or you know or for storage a few years later it was ai or crypto so like bitcoin and coinbase were winners then there's a bunch of like silly things right now it this is so strange to me it's ai but it's also well it's whatever category you guys would go in you're not quite defense tech but it's like wild to me that this shift has happened because 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 this is foolish what are you guys doing we're technology this is a technology city why don't you do like software it's to hear you say this it's so foreign to me it's also so interesting

MFM

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

MFM

we ate it a separate

MFM

way to

MFM

like

MFM

like how many more crms are there

MFM

yeah exactly it's like the

MFM

the boomers got cheaper real estate you guys got like b two b staff right like it's like that's like and now it's like on us to do like something where like the next frontier is which is like fundamentally hardware and then like also it's like it's like a no brainer you look at like the top 10 most valuable con companies in the world right now it's like seven out of 10 of them have like a hardware like an extreme like hardware component right like the biggest companies being built today are hardware companies and also in a world where you can just like vibe code overnight like a crm or a salesforce or not maybe not salesforce but like a calendly competitor it's like okay well is there really a moat in like these sorts of things anymore it's like oh yeah

MFM

you're right you're absolutely right and I think it's so fascinating because it so when sean and I lived in san francisco if if someone who looked like you so you look you're wearing a ford bronco shirt I bet you you're wearing cowboy boots and you got a little bit of swag to you and you like if you would've if you were to talk about what you're talking about it would've been like you're you're so out of touch you're out of touch for the for the for the yc group of out of touch people like it it's just so interesting to me and I think it's great

MFM

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

MFM

no

MFM

about technology windows so he basically says alright there's a reason there's a there's a almost like a scientific reason why why what you just described happens happens and so he basically says like when a wave of start ups comes out it's because of a technology change so you know for example an inflection so when we yours you're right when we first moved to san francisco I moved in 2012 and the mobile window was open and that's when instagram uber snapchat like a bunch of companies got built that relied on you having a computer with you at all times that had internet connection that had an accelerometer that had a map gps feature in it and then all these companies could get built but that window opens for a very like a a fixed amount of time and basically like you said the low hanging fruit all gets eaten and so he he went back all the way to the railroads and he's like the railroad technology window was open for forty years and that like if you just look there was not another successful railroad company after that forty year. And because all the opportunities basically got eaten automobiles was twenty five years and so in a twenty five year window you got buick dodge ford cadillac gm chevrolet lincoln chrysler all of it within a very short window and then you had nothing for another about eighty years and then the window reopened because of battery technology and you got tesla and rivian and so that that was a almost a new technology window around automobiles because the tech had changed again around batteries and so he was basically saying like b to b saas has had a twenty year window and now ai software ai starting in 2016 and that's like the current window that we're in and I would say you know what will is doing and what a lot of smart entrepreneurs are doing right now is they're in the technology window of ai robotics and three d printing and basically those three technologies have have opened up the door to build new things that couldn't have been built ten fifteen twenty years ago so this is what a technology window looks like just check this out if you're on if you're on audio you have to be on youtube to see this but I'm I'm sharing my screen here so it basically says like step one the technology is invented and only the hobbyists are playing with it out of interest and creativity right and then two is the status moment one of the hobbyists achieves status and wealth using the tech so you know for example so this is like you know marc andreessen on the on the cover of time barefoot because the hobbyist internet guy became rich by by building you know the browser and then this happened again with social networking this happened again with with elon and palmer lucky and all those guys right now who've who've had their status moment where you know palmer was like literally like living in a rv building vr headsets for like $90 using spare parts he was a hobbyist and then the hobbyist got the wealth the status moment when he sold to facebook for $3,000,000,000 and then you know same thing with elon elon was building in relative obscurity both openai you know openai was a nonprofit it was relatively obscure for the first five years that it was out that they were doing their thing but now sam altman and and elon and and palmer again with andrew have had a new status moment and then there's what he calls knowledge diffusion which is suddenly there's conferences there's podcasts like this there's newsletters there's twitter where people are sharing ideas about how to do this what's going on and you get this explosion of stuff and then competition floods and then the new incumbents are born and then then then the new incumbent regime is takes over due to their their defensibility like they build something that is defensible maybe because it's hardware maybe because it it requires scale maybe it has a network effect and the technology window close is 90% closed and you only have a few exceptions from there on out

MFM

it's so funny to sean and to meet will who's like in the thick of it actually what you're describing

MFM

yeah will when did you start were you like were you a hobbyist and when did you start with doing what doing what you're doing like when were you messing around with drones or ocean tech

MFM

so yeah I mean like like as I said I've been like you know in the ocean on the ocean near the ocean since I was a kid diving surfing you know whatever wakeboarding all these sorts of things growing up but never never had built in it really before this you know I was you know when the this kinda scooter sharing startup thing popped off I was like you know working you know in that you know my my co founders all kinda have been you know tinkering and and these sorts of things but again none of us had ever actually really done anything in the ocean which I actually think is a massive benefit right like because none of us came in with these like preconceived notions for how like subsea drones should work you know my you know two of my cofounders were building aerial drones in a drone delivery startup before so they took like a lot of the primitives from that one of them had worked on self driving cars took some of the like ideas from that but again I think there's like definitely this like idea that I agree with that like you know to really actually shake up an industry you it's probably good if you don't come from it because we came to it and like you know we we thought initially that we were gonna be maybe using someone else's platform and repurposing it but we looked at all of the subsea drones on the market and they were crap they cost like you know they were like one of the ones we were looking at which like actually had the specs that would have meant what we wanted to do cost like $500 is that that's like a quarter of our pre seed to do what we want like it's like and then like my my our cto jamie he just like went into a cave for a few days and just like came back with like a a design for like a a new type of like autonomous water water vehicle and then we like tested it and we're like oh shit this works oh shit it's like ten twenty times cheaper than like anything we could have bought you know so it's like sometimes you just need like a a new idea and like an artist to go into a cave and then you can you can like change things

MFM

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

MFM

this is like I mean all religions like mohammed went into the cave like jesus went into the desert you know like all these like prophets like they go off into the old and then they come back with like this like secret and then you know someone else spreads the word for them right like it's like yeah you know saint peter does it in like the catholic church and like others so yes this is a a common archetype data and yeah that does work yes

MFM

you you said something earlier about how a billion people rely on the sea for their food has anybody done you know food or like tuna or salmon in a way are they doing anything interesting there with like whether it's like lab grown or or something innovative yeah yeah my my friend's got a

MFM

very very interesting startup called wild type which is like sustainable sushi grade salmon so basically that's like cultivated seafood so their first product like their

MFM

what is what do you mean by cultivated

MFM

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

MFM

like grown in a lab or grown way

MFM

yeah like in a yeah exactly in this like industrial process yeah they can basically grow cells and then put them together in such a way that it tastes like sashimi grade salmon so you know in the same way that elon started off with like a a sports car right they're starting off with like your sashimi grade salmon the highest end salmon to get and I've tried it it's great

MFM

this is in san francisco it it looks like a brewery

MFM

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

MFM

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

MFM

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

MFM

holy shit

MFM

crazy to me

MFM

this is crazy

MFM

is it is it like the lab grown meats where it's like $10,000 an ounce it's like it taste we can we made you either pick you either have the cheap thing like beyond meat or impossible foods but it doesn't taste great or it's not good for you it's made with a bunch of chemicals or you have the real thing but it's super expensive and so nobody can afford it

MFM

well I think given that like my friend shared it with me that it it's not that expensive but it's

MFM

you're not that good of friends

MFM

no exactly yeah are you but I think this stuff is like sooner than we think it's around the corner

MFM

wow these guys did a hundred million dollar series b in 2022 that's pretty crazy

MFM

what what else is cool tell tell will tell me everything what the guys like you are into like some more ocean shit

MFM

some crazy ones yes yeah okay alright this one is is wild right buckle up okay ocean treasure hunting right so there is actually like you know hundreds of wrecks out there in the ocean today that potentially have like more than a billion dollars on them right like gold bullions that like the spanish were bringing back from their conquests and then you know they got hit by a storm or these sorts of things right and there's like probably thousands that have like millions of dollars of funds in them right so governments the the source governments so like the spaniards the portuguese still have claim on these things however there is precedent in history for you to do these kind of like profit sharing agreements where it's like if we find that and we restore we give you back all your artifacts we give you back everything but you know we sell some of them we get to we get can we can we keep some so you can do this right

MFM

it's like these models where it's like these saas negotiation companies where like hey if we go and save you money on your vendors and we

MFM

get a cut

MFM

we keep 20% it's that except for you go to the spanish royal government and you're like hey there's if we find any hidden treasures in the ocean can we keep a couple bars for ourselves

MFM

exactly ram for piracy who's building this

MFM

so what my 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

MFM

bro you did not have a friend that used to do this that's insane

MFM

chip forsyth you know

MFM

he went he went up the coast and just what scuba dive or what was he doing it

MFM

was chip and aj forsyth who I think you've met aj he's crazy his brother chip they basically the way it works now is it's kinda like a movie like you have these crazy people and you get other people to finance it and you say if we find this treasure you know here's the agreement on how we split it and they would go off the they would somehow narrow in on where they think it is they would spend a week trying to find it and most of the time you don't find it but occasionally you hit the lottery is that I mean is that right will how it works now

MFM

pretty much yeah yeah so there's like fundamentally two parts of like a mission it's like or three parts is like there's like you know the pre mission you know you know negotiating or like you know looking through historical records to see like where we think it could be you know kinda scoping it out and also getting permission so that when you do the recovery you have like some chance of being able to hold onto it then there's like this kind of scouting where you're actually on-site and you're doing like scouting and you're like basically using sonar to scan this this embed and understand what's there and then there's like recovery where you're bringing out these like gnarly like jcb style rovs remote operated vehicles that go down and just like dig it all up and bring it back up and then you have your party that's it

MFM

and is anybody doing this like has anybody do you know someone who's like made like $10,000,000 finding treasures in the ocean

MFM

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

MFM

with did you did you say there's 3,000,000 shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean

MFM

so I'm not sure speaking on like a total of many shipwrecks I wouldn't be surprised if there's like that many shipwrecks but there is like there's like hundreds that potentially have billions on them

MFM

wow okay that's insane what else

MFM

so there's okay I'll give you like a banger quote right there's this like canadian billionaire called ross who had this quote a few years ago he said give me a tanker of iron filings and I will give you an ice age right what he meant by that is like you could actually alter like the kind of weather of the earth by like dunking iron into the ocean right so so basically like many many parts of the the ocean are low in iron they're they they need more iron and if you add iron to these parts of the ocean you stimulate like algae growing at the surface algae then draws down carbon and then the fish eat it and then the fish die and they fall to the bottom of the sea and then so the carbon goes from the air into the bottom of the ocean right so this is like generally good because there we have too much carbon in the atmosphere we also want more fish but you need to balance it because you don't wanna put too much in and then just like there's too much salmon and then there's like salmon take over like the you know the certain like ecosystem which is maybe like not good or something like that or you know there's a basically when you're doing stuff in in in like with ecosystems the very it's very like difficult to predict how things are gonna pan out so you need to be careful so this dude didn't wasn't did do that carefully it went out like off the coast of like vancouver partnered up with these like native americans and just did like this experiment where he just like basically dumped off a load of iron filings removed it through his quantifications like thousands of tons of of of of carbon and the they had they off the coast there that year they had like the biggest like take of salmon ever as a result but the the kind of of hardee's did not like his experimentation and like the canate canadians got him with like the cia like busted his home and he got like yeah like a warrant and yeah he got in a lot of trouble so people haven't really done it since then because he he kinda got like you know he was kind of first crazy maybe like the first hobbyist to do something like this at scale but I think there is gonna be like a billion dollar company built in like marine geoengineering of some description I think I think it's like you know there's this so I'm I'm I'm catholic so it's like

MFM

there's this like a lot

MFM

of my beliefs around like environmentalism and stuff like that comes from the like this christian no notion of stewardship that like we should like look after our lands and our seas because it's like our duty too and I think I think this is like I think this is like kind of like where we're going with like how we we manage the climate like climate used to be this kind of let's like avoid the worst case scenario and it was just very like kinda like let's like stop emitting carbon but like I think there's like a more interesting idea of like this like stewardship I think of of of environmentalism where we actually just like control you know we we we steward the planet right we like we take control we get involved we you know someone like augustus a rainmaker can make it rain when we want it to rain you know someone like you aziz can come in and bring back the the the seagrasses when we need the seagrasses you know someone could like you know when we wanna draw down carbon can do like or increase fish stocks somewhere we could just like do a bit of this I think it's gonna we're gonna have to build these tools right because these we need these in tandem with you know growing the size of the economic pie if we wanna keep doing that you know we don't wanna just like shut down the economy we don't wanna like just stop doing like commissions altogether it's important for us to have these other kind of compensatory mechanisms and yeah I think we're in geoengineering so like an interesting and like underexplored space I think the main things we need to get right there are science better science on it better technology and governance the governance about it because the ocean is like a public space it's like you know you just need to get the governance power right

MFM

have you seen sean have you seen this guy augustus the founder of rainmaker

MFM

incredible mullet oh my god

MFM

wow this whole cohort of people of which will appears to be one of the like you know class presidents where there's this like they're very strange they don't fit this stereotype that when you think of a tech entrepreneur they're like kinda manly man or they're like they're not the they're not like this engineer like typical thing that you and I grew up with sean like there's something about them that is different and I can't tell if you guys are gonna take over the world to be billionaires or if you're gonna go broke but it's only gonna be one of the two do do you understand sean like this this new genre that I'm trying to describe I don't I don't know exactly what I'm what I'm saying will maybe you can like put words to it but there's this new like breed that that I

MFM

austin and san francisco had a baby you get the the stash and the mullet of austin and then you get the insane ambition and tech tech chops of set of silicon valley and that's what's happening here

MFM

for example this guy augustus I think his name is he had he's on the cover I think of forbes or something and he's sitting on a on a bench press like like with like like working out that is not something that brian chesky or you know travis kalanick would have done in 02/2012

MFM

I think there's like there's like it's emblematic of like of kind of the evolution of the technology industry though I think like you know we we began like as this kind of like hippies that found computers or people like steve jobs we were like actualizing on like the axis of like the spiritual you know realm and then it was like you know you had like people like bill gates and zuckerberg who were just like nerds like actualizing on the sense of like mind you know they were like smart and nerdy and now you have like people who are like openly flexing on like we're actualizing on the sense of of like of like the body right like we're like becoming strong and like you have like this like full integration of like mind body and spirit and it's like no wonder that this like you know like tech becoming like fully actualized on all of the access to like that a human needs to develop on is happening at the exact same time where you have like elon who who is like chief tech bro in the fucking white house right like these things this is like no coincidence to me it's like tech has like found its voice it's like found itself it's like self confident and it's like ready to like actually change the world now because it's like it's you know it's it's like spiritually like aligned it's like mentally they're you know we're smart and like we're like now like a strong group of people as well who are taking health and fitness seriously and it's like yes I this is why I think like we're at like the most interesting time in technology right now

MFM

I like that poetic you know last night I watched a a clip of the final scene of ratatouille you seen that sam

MFM

no it's a great movie

MFM

and the final scene of ratatouille is the the critic the critic who who's is the the most fearsome critic in in all of the town writes the review about the restaurant where the rat has been cooking and he just gives this beautiful monologue maybe the bet maybe the most beautiful four minutes in all of film is the last four minutes of rat ratatouille here the monologue will I think you're up there with the last four minutes of ratatouille there with your mind body and spirit analogy for tech I I think that's kind of amazing I've actually heard that before with just the technology part of it so it's like you had the initial you know the bicycle for the mind so you had steve jobs talking about how the how computers will enable creativity and then you had you know sort of ai and it's like oh we gave computers a brain and now they can think for themselves and then with robotics and self driving cars it's like we gave the computers a body so they can move around and pick up things and do things and I like how you you extended that to to you know the the entrepreneurial will that has has has grown in that way

MFM

bezos and zuckerberg they're getting jacked like they're doing trt they look like look like this is like I think that's that's true

MFM

problematic of like

MFM

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 you know and like what jordy and and john are doing there it's like they're like they're you know the the technology brothers they're like leaning into the fact that they're like tech bros that used to be a slur right now it's like oh I'm confident in it I'm like I'm owning it and they're like doing these like hilarious promo videos with them like sipping dom perignon like it's like there's like a confidence and an air of like okay let's do it now you know we're not like we're not gonna be like at like the events and functions anymore kinda lying about what

MFM

you're hearing dude listen to this yourself

MFM

I got an email from this guy named jamie at the wall street journal so jamie is a a reporter for wall street journal's style team and he listened to this he goes I'm writing a story about tech guys embracing western wear so basically cowboy clothes in the past recent years and I wanna write about how the tech bro uniform has changed from quarter zips and allbirds to denim shirts cowboy boots and like when I saw this and he said tech bro I was like

MFM

dude that's amazing

MFM

like I

MFM

don't think I could talk like it this is academia

MFM

life win that he thinks you're the expert to go to right

MFM

yeah life win but I was like I'm I'm not exactly in tech but that's amazing that you think that I like I am a fashion influencer officially no yeah

MFM

reply mission accomplished yeah dude that's amazing and and you're right like dude is there any difference or you you know the first time you saw zuck doing mma do you remember when that video came out is there any difference between that video and the first time you saw like a boston robotics or boston dynamics do like robot dog getting kicked and like jumping around and like doing backflips and shit like there's no difference between the two videos it's the same video

MFM

days that everyone remembers where

MFM

they were when they saw it

MFM

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 the boston dynamics robot

MFM

will one of the last questions can I invest yeah yeah great okay cool because I think this is awesome I you guys are you guys are insane man this energy is so wild I'm not convinced that it's gonna end one like okay so on one hand it it goes both ways so on one hand there's the hubris where you know you're like a you know in the case of androl you're boeing or you're one of these huge companies and you're like you know parker or palmer you know nothing you know just go back to

MFM

it would be better if they called him parker parker more condescending little parker listen parker

MFM

they would be like palmer you know you know nothing you know you're just you go back to making facebook apps you know and like probably eight out of 10 times that idea is right right where like there's a incumbent and like they fail because it's really hard and there's centuries of of hard work to go against in competition and so that's the same with you and I I would have to imagine where you have these young really smart people who have no experience and is this the 10% of the time where you guys are just gonna take over the world or is this another time where someone's gonna be like look this is exactly what you told you it does not work

MFM

alright listen that guy john that that guy who said give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age here's what I say give me a hundred mullets and I'll give you a 10 x portfolio I just need will I need augustus I need palmer with a mullet right three mullets I need 97 more mullets and I'll give you a 10 x return

MFM

okay give give me the phone

MFM

I'll find I'll find the mullet for you

MFM

you find the mullets

MFM

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

MFM

oh I definitely understand that feeling yeah for sure I I am not qualified to judge the feasibility of something but I think in general it's not about any you know if nothing if anybody if anybody who's doing a startup like this thinks it's a sure thing or a sure bet you're nuts right like right you're gonna have to perform a miracle right and that's okay the the important thing is oh wow we took a portion of our brainpower that was otherwise gonna be building x or working at y company you know working at facebook optimizing you know ad clicks or starting a company that was gonna be doing you know b to b hr whatever software and instead now we we peeled off a portion of that talent and now we sent you know a hundred mullets at these problems and I think that that that's the winning strategy is a hundred or a thousand shots on goal like this and then the winners will obviously emerge

MFM

well I can assure you what we're doing is very real you wouldn't have a million dollars in our bank account without it we wouldn't have done all the things we've done in the last five months if you wanna come here to san francisco and see some real robots in ocean and the door is always open sam same for you champ

MFM

I I gotta ask you two quick questions number one seagrass seems so random and when I if you started this company you might have thought oh I'll do drones like for warfare

MFM

yeah

MFM

how did you arrive at the seagrass thing was it instant was it was that the initial idea or did you do some discovery to the it was the

MFM

initial idea it was the initial idea I came to one of my co founders and he was on a surf trip and he kinda the same ones who went into the cave and designed our auv went heard about searass and went went to duke haven like went deep on searass and came back to us and presented like this is this is a very interesting space and we kinda

MFM

he heard about searass on a surf trip

MFM

from who a marine biologist friend of his who is working on it's

MFM

a guy out a guy out in the wave

MFM

yeah dude this yeah this cofounder is absolutely carrying your company

MFM

yeah

MFM

he's Scott you've built the tech and figured out the go to market I

MFM

love it yeah he's the well yeah he he found he found the kinda he was the one who brought seagrass to us and then myself and my other cofounders kinda put it together and like this is what the business probably should look like but then yeah we kinda went out from there into other areas and like you know like I think any brilliant company finds a local monopoly to build in first somewhere where there's nobody else doing stuff with technology where you've you know it's a great time and nobody's ever heard of what you're even doing initially and you can it's a pretty big market you can you know bring cash into your business it's like a lifeblood and so it's been a great place for us to start it's like the best place for us to start nobody's ever heard of it so I think that's always a good place to to start off on and then yes we're gonna use that as a kind of launching? To do other interesting things in the ocean who do

MFM

you admire will who do you wanna be like

MFM

steve irwin probably

MFM

dude motherfucker I was gonna say this earlier on I go you are steve irwin I do I you got sea vibes hardcore man do you got any khaki shorts on right now

MFM

not right now but we have a picture of him up on the wall here

MFM

oh I you scream steve erwin you have steve erwin vibes through and through

MFM

yeah yeah I know he's I'm yeah I'm hopeful I can get the the erwin family on the ulysses trainer at some.

MFM

We got a we got a holler at bindi bindi erwin

MFM

that would be great robert as

MFM

well I love those guys

MFM

yeah robert as well yeah you know look steve I think is like it's so funny you know people say steve on a podcast in the tech it's like steve jobs it's like for me it's

MFM

steve irwin so

MFM

you should have just said steve at the beginning and then let us fall into your trap dude sean

MFM

sean there's this famous video I I know you've seen

MFM

this well

MFM

there's this famous video of it's steve irwin and his wife what's her name I I forget her name and anyway there's an interviewer who asked steve like do you know you don't seem like you care

MFM

sam sam sam sam sam just look just look just look what's on my screen just look what's on my screen right now

MFM

there it is thank you

MFM

when I was pulling up because I love that clip with you brother I love this clip

MFM

this clip play it play it

MFM

what good is a fast car a flash house and a gold plate of dunny to me absolutely no good at all I've been put on this planet to protect wild life and wilderness areas which in essence is gonna help humanity I wanna have the purest oceans I wanna be able to drink water straight out of that creek I wanna stop the ozone layer I wanna save the world and you know money money's great I can't get enough money and you know what I'm gonna do with it I'm gonna buy wilderness areas with it every single cent I get goes straight into conservation and guess what charles I don't give a rip whose money it is mate I'll use it and I'll spend it on buying land

MFM

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

MFM

yeah it's it's it's and so I think the traits in him that I wear are just like the pea like raw passion it's like just like unbridled passion it's like this is like nonsensical passion it's like you think I'm gonna have

MFM

a conversation without a microphone no I'm gonna put a microphone there I'm gonna record a podcast I'm gonna record a podcast every day and I don't give a rip who's listening because you know what I'm a podcaster and I'm gonna podcast my ass off

MFM

it's a whole lot more lame when you're not talking about like saving the earth you know what I mean yeah I tried I tried like when we're talking about like conversion rate optimization or b two b dude in fact will we kinda my generation and the generation before me we 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 b two b software stuff so you guys could do this fun amazing stuff so really you're welcome

MFM

thank you thank you

MFM

can we do just a quick happy hour of two topics that you had on this list that I you know sam if you gotta run or whatever feel feel free but I just gotta ask you about these so I wanna do the fun one and then the spiritual one the fun one is conspiracy theories you're a big conspiracy you're a fan of conspiracy theories I believe and you like people who like conspiracy theories so can you just give me a rant on why conspiracy theories are underrated here

MFM

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

MFM

isn't it funny how contrarian is this like really positive description and conspiracy theorist is like this like negative description you know what I mean it's the same thing

MFM

I just think it's very important to you know have a weird idea to take them seriously right like if we just had heard the see your ass idea and just like rubbished it you know we wouldn't I would like I don't know what the hell I'd be doing today you know it's like you need to take something weird and go with it so like I don't believe like blindly believe every report of telepathy and nonverbal autistic children every like late night ufo sighting but like I refuse to dismiss them outright and I think you know history shows us that breakthroughs often happen at the edges where people are curious enough or foolhardy enough to investigate the unexplainable so it's like whether it's like christian mystics you know who swear by miraculous healings or physics experiments that like challenge our understanding of space time I think it's very important to like lean into these weird things and ask what if and yeah I think conspiracy theories are just kinda like fun as well they're like kinda like horoscopes for dudes so they're like if any if not if nothing else like they're just like it's like it's just like a fun thing to kinda like spend your your

MFM

your time reading about on here you talk about aliens we are with joe gebbia recently who's like the ninetieth richest person in the world and I was like joe look you're worth like $10,000,000,000 like if there's illuminati like you are either in it or you're friends with the people in it tell me one thing that like you guys talk about and he looked at me he goes aliens are real and he went on a he went on a big he had a big diatribe on his passion for like you know ufos and aliens and how he absolutely is on board with them

MFM

in 100%

MFM

he's on board with them what is that

MFM

he came off very passionately like it is absolutely a thing

MFM

and the funny thing is if you meet joe he's he's a serious dude joe doesn't just say wild shit for wild shit's sake you know joe's not like oh he's a kooky billionaire no no no joe is like an extremely principled artist he is a a very serious individual and so for him to say something like that it's not like you you don't discount it with the same discount rate you would if john mcafee was the guy saying it you know what I mean

MFM

if if your reader's walking down this rabbit hole the best website I recommend going is a website a friend of mine runs uapevidence.com

MFM

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

MFM

I think it lies in a conspiracy more like wacky weird rabbit hole you need to go down is you need to listen to the telepathy tapes podcast

MFM

I have and I love that

MFM

what's what what is this is this like I can read your mind

MFM

so basically there's this group of people that people have been calling crazy for like the last like two decades right it's basically the teachers and parents of children with nonverbal autism because they've been convinced that their kids have been able to like read their mind and now for like the first time with teaching kids how to spell on like ipads and also with like getting researchers in to study them they're actually verifying these telepathic capabilities right so like a mother will like go into one room and she'll be shown like a random number generator and her son akhil in the other room will hit the exact same three numbers 100% of the time consistently in tests that's awesome yes

MFM

it it's like the serial podcast but it's this woman investigating these claims and she's like you know like an npr skeptical let me call it right so she she comes in she's like this didn't make a ton of sense but I'm open minded

MFM

and she turned

MFM

I I didn't finish the whole thing I I listened probably the first two or three but I was listening to while I was going to sleep and I just had some like wild wild nights there so I decided alright I need to only listen to this you know not falling asleep if I'm gonna do this right by by the way will did you walk away from that you you know half convinced three fourths convinced totally convinced what did you walk away

MFM

I was going into it already with some sort of like priors that I thought that like consciousness consciousness isn't local to the brain like we like to think that like our brain is this kinda like dvd player where like consciousness is playing and it's like being played to us and that's how we experience things I think we're more like I always kinda thought and for different reasons that we're more like a radio antenna you know you have these stories of people like their their son dies in an accident and they just know something's wrong right they just like know right like there's like the you know everyone every family has these stories about death or like something bad happened and they just like knew they woke up in the middle of the night and they're like I couldn't sleep then after that and they wake up the next day they hear about this awful accident or something like that or you have like there's like knowingness and these other things like just like telepathy twins telepathy and stuff like that and there's like this world of parapsychology which is like the study of these kind of psi phenomena there's like a few very reproducible experiments in it like the gainsfeld experiment which if you allow me to go on this like very short rabbit hole but like the most reproducible experiment in this field is basically you take two people you put them in like two separate rooms these could be twins these could be a husband wife they could be two artists they could be two people who don't know each other different settings and basically you give me a picture and you give and you're the receiver then in another room and I'm in one room and I'm talking about this random picture I've been given let's say it's one in four different pictures I get a picture of an elephant for five minutes I talk about elephants I saturate my brain with africa and wild animals in savannah you're in the other river you're listening to white noise and you're talking basically about what you're sensing feeling that they could be about and then at the end of the five minutes I've I stop and you get replayed what you were saying to yourself for five minutes and you get the four random images and you get to pick one of the four and then you would assume if complete chance you know you would 25% chance of getting it right but pretty consistently you get like 30% or above in this like experiment and then when there's like twins husband and wives and or artists they actually score like more consistently 35 in some instances like 70% to some of these experiments and so I've always kind of been like primed to think that like actually maybe we're more like we're touching into something and like that explains a lot of the spiritual and woo woo stuff and then I can see this and it's like very good experimental evidence and really well done and I'm like okay no that's a % legit like our brain is not like this like ai chip that like runs and just like tells us what to do it's like an ai chip but it's like it also has a radio antenna that can connect to other people can maybe connect to god spirits other things we don't really know

MFM

dude I'm so bummed that I grew up in the b two b era of startups yeah it's so bummed well I wish I like I wish I was ten years younger or you were ten I wish we could've hung out

MFM

dude let's grab some beers

MFM

I went to a bachelor party this weekend and everybody on the it was a it was a bachelor party where the bachelors and the bachelorettes were both at doing it together basically it's a it's a party together and the bachelorette side was so cool like every single one of them just you know those tattoos that aren't like filled in they're just like it almost looks like a pencil sketch

MFM

yeah

MFM

yeah just seven or eight of those some piercings sense of style off the charts knowledge of beer and music way beyond my recognition you know sexuality was a total spectrum literally felt like I came from a I was a caveman and I was like or like you know like I was the gingerbread man actually I wasn't even a real human being I was a cookie cutter shape that was placed in this room

MFM

that's awesome that is so funny

MFM

I think one like universal law about technology is that like it breeds variance right like it just like it it creates like skewed outcomes I think you probably like see this in like younger generations as well like you've got like weird like kinda like schizo people like me that will like burn your ear off by like conspiracy theories and like you know go down like these weird rabbit holes but like I think you also it's like on the like maybe on the more negative end that could send you down like some pretty dark places that maybe you wouldn't be a productive member of society if you go down like those like into those like very dark corners of the internet or similarly like it's you know you have people who are like doing like great things but then you also like you know I think there is like a very interesting question that's posed in technology right now is like where are the you know the the kind of like less than kinda 25 you know you know billion dollar company founders this is like an interesting question that I think is still not really like there's no satisfying answers around like previous generations had like the collisons pretty early you know we had like alexander wang like who's maybe like few years older than me pretty early still doesn't seem clear why there isn't one in this generation maybe we have to wait another year or two for companies like ulysses or rainmaker or others to like to to to get there but there is there is definitely like a I think a bigger skew in both the ideas that young people are interested in today I think that's like broadly just like downstream of yeah technology

MFM

are you gonna become an american

MFM

yeah I think I'm gonna I'm on the green card path yep

MFM

my last question was the spiritual one you said you lived with buddhist monks in nepal and for a summer you learned a lot and one thing I liked you said I couldn't come around to their view which states that zero desires leads to enlightenment and so you and then you said like you know I you wanted to be you wanted to be action oriented and do something with your life rather than sit and sort of renounce everything and then you said something like I came to I came to explain my five desires or six desires can you just ex give give me the quick story on your summer with the monks and then what you landed at

MFM

yeah so yeah I just kinda want I just had heard that that you you could do this right you can actually just like find a monastery to like basically put you up if you teach them english so I I did that found a monastery in nepal that would like put me up it's pretty rural a few hours outside the kathmandu went there flew there taught them in I taught myself to teach english before I came over was teaching them english and then like in the downtime was like able to speak to some of the older monks who had like good english and like ask them about their ideology because there's

MFM

just a there's just five monks with like a thick irish accent speaking english out there they're like yeah I learned from an expert

MFM

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 five k t shirt and I was like I was like sorry now you might have like no english but I was like where did you get this like t shirt like this is like we're near where I'm from and he was like he was like had like kinda like an irish accent he was like oh well you know I actually work with an irish guy he has like an orphanage and like a charity out here and I was like oh wait like what's this like irish guy's name the irish guy he named was like the one irish guy that my my neighbor who's like my mom's friend my mom's friend was like my mom was worried about me going to nepal she's like well you know you need to have a contact in nepal when you go over there you know I was like and it's my neighbor knew a guy who's in nepal who had a charity out there anyway like this random guy I met in this like tiny village worked with him so this is like you know there's like irish people everywhere

MFM

everyone just talking like kind of like all these monks are like

MFM

little I boxed them they're like you'll do nothing

MFM

I boxed the bullocks off them yeah you'll you'll do nothing literally

MFM

there's irish people everywhere we have we have we have people everywhere that's like the kind of moral

MFM

is that what the monks are are saying we didn't hear to come we didn't come to take part we came to take over

MFM

alright so so sorry so you go there and you're continue

MFM

yeah I'm I'm curious about the region I'm asking questions about it but one thing I just couldn't get over was like you know they don't believe in desire like they believe desire is like what leads to suffering if you desire for something then you're creating a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you have that thing and I'm just like dude I'm very like american dream pill I'm like you know I should want for things I should want for things but I can see how that can go wrong as well right because that leads to like you know keeping up with the joneses type lifestyle or maybe like you know kinda like the you know the fatties on on the chair at walmart kinda like thing you know like that that's like probably like when it goes like maybe like too far hey

MFM

you better watch it will it's our tip-off you better watch what you're saying

MFM

no sir you're not that fat soft yeah so anyway so anyway so that's why I can see where I can go wrong right but I do think there was like an essence of truth in there where it's like maybe you should like actually try to trim down things as little as possible and I had this like bizarre experience where I was I was I'd went and did everest base camp afterwards and I was thinking a lot about like the things that they were saying to me and again I feel like I had like a download like one of these experiences where like something just came into my brain that I don't think I hadn't been thinking about it before and I genuinely think it was a download from you know something spiritual that like gave me like some guidance on how I I was literally it sounds crazy but I was sitting on a rock like just like on a break in the hike this like ten day hike up to a base camp and I like was like thinking through it it's like okay well if you have no desire like what do you do it's like oh maybe you should have zara but the minimum amount of them then I was like what is like important to me and I was like on my hand I was like oh my family my friends my health my wealth my craft and I was like oh shit like that's like five things that's like nice and clean and then I like had this like idea at the same time of like a rose bush rose bushes if you like leave them go unkept they basically just grow like briars and they go thorns and the flowers don't really grow you have to like cut them back to let the energy go back to like the rose and I was just like I had this like very clear vision of like roses and I was like oh okay right so this is it okay so whenever I'm like down over something it's like if it's not one of these like five important things to me then it's like okay just like let it go like stop desiring for it and I found that

MFM

to be helpful you had a girlfriend no

MFM

what that was your reaction to his story about the buddhist monks and like realizing the meaning of life

MFM

you wanna dude you tell me an irish guy with that and its inner profile isn't he just gonna destroy the whole city give me a break

MFM

saving the world saving the world's seagrass former monk sam's five desires family health wealth fitness and will I will those are those are sam's five desires

MFM

this is so good man

MFM

you're the best will this is awesome people should check you out where on twitter you're will o'brien what's your what's your handle

MFM

at will o b r I w I l o b r I

MFM

okay great and good luck with the company man

MFM

thank you dude thank you

MFM

alright that's it that's the pod thank you