00:15:19 · Will O'Brien
[00:15:19] S0: I think it's probably like, you know, some combination of all of them, but I think it was very much just like a passion thing, you know, to begin with. Like, I grew up by the seaside. Had very much... My mom would just put me in a wetsuit and send me down to the beach, that was my babysitter in the summers. I'm very much a very pro growth environmentalist and a very eco pragmatist is maybe how I'd describe myself. A beautiful flourishing future for humanity has an economy that's consistently growing and a biosphere that supports that consistently growing economy, and carbon removal is one of those core technologies that I think enables that along with clean energy and other things. Then, yeah, just the ocean as this frontier, as a very true frontier. We've mapped more of the surface of Mars than we have the depths of our ocean. When I heard that and meditated on that a little bit more, I was like, God, this is crazy, right? Like, there is there is, like, a there is a part of Earth that over 75% of it, have no eyes on and have no clue really what's down there. And, like, you know, less than maybe a 100 people are thinking about this and working this on a daily basis. Like, for how long was all of, like, Western civilization focused on exploration? And now, like, okay, we're doing space. We have this whole other frontier here, and you're telling me, there's a fraction of people actually working on this day to day. I was like, this is crazy. This is insane that like... And put the money aside, you know, and just think like humans need to explore and discover and learn.
00:16:52 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:16:52] S1: And part part of your thesis is, if I understand this, just like SpaceX, you know, if you lower the cost to orbit, then there's other things you can do. You can do Starlink if you can get things up into orbit cheaply. Similarly, you believe that you can unlock new technologies if you lower the cost of doing things in the ocean. [00:17:10] S0: Yes. I think there's this very generalizable framework for how frontiers get developed. The American West is a good example of this. It's like you have this exploratory period where people go there and go back, and they typically go there and go back for some kind of very high value reason where the cost of going there is justified because you're recovering fur or you're getting pelts or something like that. [00:17:36] S1: There's a single high value initial use case. In And
00:17:36 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:17:36] S1: There's a single high value initial use case. In And [00:17:41] S0: it's defense reasons. Yeah. Satellites up there to watch the Russians. Yeah. So there's this initial expedition period, and then you move from an expedition period to, Okay, well, what happens if we spend more time here and get more What happens when we not just gather information from here or singular things, but more things, and become more persistent in our settlement there. So then in the American West, you have the development of the railroad, then access becomes way more easy. You get all this development of places like California. Space, you get reusable launch. Maritime, it's like, okay, if you could actually go and have persistent robotic systems out there doing the important work, then there's a lot of new things, I think, that you can do. [00:18:22] S1: If you want to go plant a bunch of seagrass, do you get approval from anyone on that, or is it just [00:18:28] S0: Unfortunately, seagrass you know, I think this is, like, of one of the saddest things about the environmental movement, this concept of green tape, Like, red tape and green tape. It's like, yeah, that is the single biggest barrier. For example, there is a certain very endangered location of seagrasses in Australia that we would love to do a project, that we've been trying to do a project for a long time, and it would be probably the biggest seagrass restoration project in the world in a very important location, but kinda banging your head off the wall. [00:18:59] S1: How did you end up in the Chinese prison?
00:18:59 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:18:59] S1: How did you end up in the Chinese prison? [00:19:01] S0: This is the topic. I was in a I wanna get back to the robots. You know, there was an interesting time in the 2010s where China's on this, like, ascendant path or whatever, and my mom was like, Well, you gotta learn Mandarin. So I go to Shanghai. I'm about 16 years of age, 15 years of age. I go there, and we end up in, like, some night market, and we were there a week before, and we go back a week later, and they falsely accuse us of shoplifting, and I think it was this kind of scam they had. Like, you know, they would bring these kind of white kids or something like in, and then [00:19:35] S1: This scam who had? [00:19:36] S0: People in the thing. What would happen is when they'd accuse you of the crime... [00:19:41] S1: They have to pay a fine on the spot. [00:19:42] S0: You have to pay a... Well, you get brought to the prison station or the police station, and you remember, this is the time before, like, instant money sending, [00:19:50] S1: right?
00:19:50 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca, S3
[00:19:50] S1: right? [00:19:52] S0: You know, historians of The Americas Terms the time. Crazy time. So we went to Western Union, the money, and, like, that takes, you know, it's like China's, whatever, nine hours ahead of Ireland, it's, like, 10:00 at night, so my mom's not awake. So, you know, I ring her, whatever, three in the morning, you know, whenever she's up, Or, you know, it's nine in the morning, Ireland time, she's awake, because I'm like, well, mean, like, I'm in this prison cell, Shanghai prison. Can you, like, send Western Union me the money and get me out? She's like, okay. Alright. So they, you know, the value of the phones that we shoplifted. [00:20:22] S1: Of course, nowadays, they just write it off as a deep fake AI scam [00:20:25] S0: like I was [00:20:25] S2: gonna say, now that's an eleven Labs call. That's an eleven Labs call for sure. I've had to build a safe word with my family. [00:20:31] S0: Send them to me in iTunes, true. Yeah. Exactly. [00:20:37] S1: One of my favorite parts of Stripe is Works in Progress, our magazine dedicated to new ideas driving economic and technological progress. Take the latest issue landing on doorsteps right now. It covers how China's different cities compete to grow their local economies, why regulations are holding up ways to eradicate mosquito borne diseases, how hedge funds make millions predicting the outcomes of drug trials, and about [00:20:58] S3: a 130 pages of other
00:20:58 · S3, John Collison, Chris Sacca
[00:20:58] S3: a 130 pages of other [00:20:59] S1: fascinating stuff you're unlikely to read elsewhere. And we want the works in progress to be as beautiful to look at and hold as it is interesting to read. And call me biased, but I think it's the most beautiful magazine in print today. To read works in progress online or to get the print edition delivered to your door, head to worksinprogress.co. [00:21:19] S2: As I look back, and I did, I looked back at the original pitch you came to us with, but as I look back at that and think about how you from day one were thinking about all of the ways this company could, all the markets it could address and what it could do, but at the core of it was making the vehicle. If you had come to a venture capitalist ten, twelve years ago, fuck, for some, maybe six years ago, and said, Hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing. We are actually going to build things in The US. We are not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen or whatever, and so we're going to... For those components that seem like the supply chain might be dicey, we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device. That would get you shown to the parking lot. [00:22:13] S1: So how verticalized are you guys, and where'd you start? Where are going to...