00:42:40 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:42:40] S1: The US Navy's pretty big. [00:42:42] S0: Yes. I bet he has more [00:42:43] S2: craft soon. But I'll tell you, as an investor, once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very reliable [00:42:51] S0: and very [00:42:52] S2: and very bankable. So it may take some time, but that's what our business is, is to bridge that to where it comes through. And strangely, whether it's as a hard tech investor or even in some of the decarbonization work we do, one of the most sober and consistent customers for the work we do is the Department of Defense. [00:43:10] S1: But they're actually a good buyer. [00:43:11] S2: When you get to the people who actually get shit done at these organizations, they're incredibly well informed, and the decisions are apolitical and sober. And so when somebody comes inbound to him, that's the other thing. Like, when you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have. So they're paying attention. And when they come in and say, look, you solve a problem for us at one hundredth of the cost we pay today. [00:43:37] S1: Yes. [00:43:38] S2: So once we get to that contracting process, it may take a while to fill out your master service agreement, your SLAs and shit, but the reality is that's very bankable. [00:43:47] S1: And they're using you for mine clearing stuff, maybe? [00:43:49] S0: Yeah. So I might actually just go back to one of your original questions, how is work done on the ocean today and how are [00:43:55] S1: you different?
00:43:55 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:43:55] S1: you different? [00:43:55] S0: Because it kinda makes the rest of the things clear and, again, draws a consistent throughline. So, again, most important work today is a few $100,000 for a ship per day to go out and do something On that ship, you're going, and then you're, like, typically have, like, a bunch of guys onboard. If you want to do something underwater, you put, like, this tethered vehicle, you're remote operating, and you look at the screens, and you take shifts, and you go and do the thing underwater. You find the mine. You repair the pipeline, whatever, you know, whatever it may be. So, again, they all have this shape. Plant seagrass. But then the problem is then it's like, okay, well, because due to, like, union laws and labor laws, it's like, okay, well, people can only max work, like, maybe eight hours a day, and you wanna work twenty four hours because you're going out there anyway, so you need three people then. And then it's like, okay, each of those people, like, has a manager, and, like, and then you have, like, the ship captain, and then you have the the second mate, and then you have, like, the guy who needs to cook the spaghetti, and then you have the doctor because you've gone over the eight people, and you left from The US port. It's like, so you end up with this massive crew, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, and that's a broad shape of all the tasks underwater, so then the idea is if you can, yeah, do that autonomously, don't have any of the labor cost, you can control over Starlink, any nice, know...
00:45:03 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:45:03] S1: Can you work in worse sea conditions than... [00:45:05] S0: Yeah, exactly. That's another thing, and you go [00:45:07] S2: fast as well. You can [00:45:08] S0: go fast with the water. Like, when people are board, you can't... You get seasick. [00:45:11] S1: Do you compete with the Neoprines for some of these, ceramic or those kind of folks? [00:45:18] S0: The ceramic don't have an underwater They're building ships, they're just gonna become a new shipyard. Got it. And I think where we're different maybe from an underworld or otherwise is the thing we're thinking about is like, again, robots will do an increasing share of the work in the future. Who builds the underwater ones? A lot of the folks in the defense sector are thinking, how do we make things go boom? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any gnomnets can put C4 on a vehicle and make it go boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is like, do you build a general purpose underwater robotic platform? And that's the thing that we think unlocks the ocean at scale. That's the thing that turns it from a $3,000,000,000,000 economy into a $10,000,000,000,000 plus place for commerce. [00:46:00] S1: The undersea cables, how worried should we be about that? [00:46:03] S0: Absolutely. Totally asymmetric. Like, Jesus. I think this is like, yeah, this is like one of the only movies. [00:46:11] S1: Do you guys have any undersea cable angle? Yeah,
00:46:11 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:46:11] S1: Do you guys have any undersea cable angle? Yeah, [00:46:15] S0: We have one... We have some work in that domain. Yes. Can't it much. No, no. I can't talk about too much, but yes, there is basically a need to create a... Again, you know, the advocate... What we're trying to advocate the maritime domain to move away from is this, like, episodic, singular campaign thing, more like we are creating permanent settlements there, like we're trying to do in space, and a part of that would be, like, a persistent defense network around, yeah, like, all, like, kind of critical waterways. So a very critical waterway is off the West Coast Of Ireland. All of the cables that run from The US into Europe, like, pretty much, like, cross into Ireland. So that's, like, one, like, area that you might highlight as a choke point. There's a number of these. There's a number of them in Asia, [00:47:04] S2: in The Middle East. [00:47:05] S0: All of these areas should just be, like, persistently monitored twenty four seven. Yeah. But it's much too expensive to do that manually. So, yes, that's a a massive high asymmetric. [00:47:16] S2: Mean, so a hundred years ago, I used to co lead the team at Google that built all the data centers, and we also did the trans oceanic fiber and such. So data centers are fragile and fiber is even more fragile. [00:47:28] S0: And the way you take [00:47:28] S2: a data center offline is you bring a pair of fucking garden shears and you cut the fiber that goes [00:47:32] S1: through. And there's many fewer cables than people think.
00:47:32 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:47:32] S1: through. And there's many fewer cables than people think. [00:47:35] S0: Yeah. There are. And by [00:47:36] S2: the way, like, I found one in Oregon. No one used to publish their fiber maps, and so the way I would find them to figure out where I wanted to cite a data center is I would drive around the coast until I saw Call Before You Dig signs. And once in Oregon, I encountered some Call Before You Dig signs. [00:47:52] S1: They're like, oh, The start [00:47:53] S2: street was called 5 Nines. What kind... Only a fucking geek would name a street 5 Nines. And I was like, yep. I got it now. [00:48:00] S0: And then we'd follow the call before you dig. [00:48:02] S2: And so... But if you really wanna take a data center offline, until we have Starlink and other diverse opportunity, you know, like diverse providers in that space, you literally snip the fiber and it's offline, right? Yeah. I say this partly because partly we should be aware of this cause we need to protect it partly also to other humans. In the event we do get to a phoom moment in AI, we might all have to our part. We might have to all do our part to kill the data centers. [00:48:28] S1: That's funny. [00:48:29] S0: I'm... Look at her. I just put myself on the daunting list. Yeah. [00:48:31] S1: Yeah. A bad fact to having to pre [00:48:35] S2: train But for the reality is, right now, it is the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West metaphor for what you do, it really is that, and we do need protection of those resources out there.
00:48:35 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:48:35] S2: train But for the reality is, right now, it is the Wild West. When you bring up the Wild West metaphor for what you do, it really is that, and we do need protection of those resources out there. [00:48:44] S0: Yeah. So we have about, I think it's about 200 sea cables today, and they typically only get taken out by anchor dragons accidental for the most part. Some of them not, but if you did want to do a targeted, like, demolition, whatever, like many of them, It's, like, not crazy hard. [00:49:03] S2: But I also don't know what, like, they get snooped, and so I get read in, and they get snooped, and [00:49:09] S1: As in taps? [00:49:10] S2: Yeah, like, it's not hard for China to go listen to those things, and so, and read everything. It's actually the least fortified, like, it's hard for them to get into a hardened facility in Downtown San Francisco. Very easy [00:49:23] S1: to on 5 9th Street in Oregon. [00:49:24] S2: Yes. It's very easy for them to hang out and listen. Yes. And so we need patrols [00:49:29] S1: there for sure. We're gonna have to leave it there. Good. Chris, thank you, guys. [00:49:34] S2: Yeah, right on, man. Cheers, guys. Cheers.