00:08:14 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:08:14] S2: And I I hate to concede there's no appreciable difference between pints, but nothing sacred anymore. No, no. See. Yeah, [00:08:21] S0: yeah. It's the ceremony. [00:08:22] S1: Is the one shot. The [00:08:25] S2: The one shot. [00:08:29] S1: So with seagrass, why does it need to be restored, period? Like, what's going on in the oceans? [00:08:34] S0: So a few reasons. If you take kind of current projections for maybe how fish stocks are going to do, Kind of in and around the 2040s, many of the kind of critical fish stocks in the ocean could just be totally wiped out. Basically, the population curves are not really looking good for many fish species. It's like billions of people rely on it as their primary source of protein or income every day. [00:08:59] S1: Overfishing in general. [00:09:01] S0: Overfishing, yes, and a big driver is also habitat loss. You have a lot of factors driving it, and basically the rate at which we restore these ecosystems is you know, 100 to a thousand times less the rate we lose them. [00:09:12] S1: Okay. So it's important to restore the seagrass. Yeah. And we've lost a lot of it. And you started with that as part of the need to restore the seagrass, ended up making underwater robots. Yeah. Which is how you got into underwater robot space?
00:09:26 · Will O'Brien
[00:09:26] S0: Yes, I mean, you know, we started solving the seagrass problem, but very quickly into solving that problem, like, was very clear, wow, there's a lot of other similarly shaped problems in the ocean. From first principles, if you want to build the ocean robot company, right, you need a few things. You need full x y z access on the ocean as a domain. Okay, so to do that you need a surface craft because there's less drag on the surface, so that's where you should be doing most of your transit, and then you drop an underwater vehicle to go down. So we developed this autonomous surface vehicle called a Vaithin, 2,000 nautical mile range, and that goes and drops the kids off to school, so to speak, to go do what they want, and underwater vehicle then is called Mako. It's launched into the water. That goes and finds the location where it needs to do the job. It goes scan something or robotically manipulate something, and then it gets... Leviathan will say, come home, and it goes in, and then that's the end of the mission. The state of underwater vehicles before we started building Mako were primarily to gather data and not to do robotics. The vehicle looks a lot different if you want to build something that can physically manipulate underwater, so there was a few design decisions we had to make there. Also, our underwater vehicle, you know, we wanted to build one kind of general purpose form factor that could solve a lot of different problems, so there was some pretty clear design decisions that we made at the start where our underwater vehicle Mako is made of these kind of Lego building blocks that make it up. So if you want to add, let's say, an extra 150 nautical miles of endurance and range, you just add extra battery packs because we knew some people would want that. Other people would want the vehicle to go faster, so you have a different rear thrust module. Some people want to take images underwater, so we have stereo cameras that can give you three d imaging. Some people want sonar, you know, bathymetric maps, so we have, like, a sonar front module.
00:11:18 · Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
So, yeah, there was a few very deliberate early design decisions which enabled us then when the US Navy comes knocking and says, hey, we've got some problems you'd like us to work on, or offshore energy companies that, Oh, well, because we made these early design decisions in the architecture, it was very easy for us to adapt. [00:11:37] S2: Can we dig into that for a second? Sure. Because, like, a few things. First of all, just for all the geeks, I'd love to hear why Seagrass and, like, how it compares as a as a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there.
00:11:37 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:11:37] S2: Can we dig into that for a second? Sure. Because, like, a few things. First of all, just for all the geeks, I'd love to hear why Seagrass and, like, how it compares as a as a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there. [00:11:52] S0: Yeah. Seagrass is, you know, it's like your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that. It's the most slept on plant, I think, out there. It's zero attention. Carl is the very good looking friend or something like that that gets all the attention, but Seagrass is really who you should be talking to. Carl gets a lot of the funding, and seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean. It covers 2% of the sea floor but holds 20% of the ocean's carbon. It is the ocean being the world's largest natural carbon sink anyway, so it's very important in that regard. About 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat, so just very important. Brain sporent species doesn't really get that much attention. It grows up and down the coastlines of Ireland, The UK, here in California, actually the same species in Ireland down to California, on the East Coast, in Australia. So, yeah, we're working across... We've got projects in Virginia, in Southern Florida, in California now, in Sausalito, and a few other locations, also in [00:12:55] S1: Well, Great Barrier Reef you started the company to do seagrass restoration, and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass project.
00:12:55 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:12:55] S1: Well, Great Barrier Reef you started the company to do seagrass restoration, and you're now mostly focused on the robot. You haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass project. [00:13:04] S0: Yeah. Fundamentally, the tech platform we're building, again, because we made these early design decisions, mean that... Well, you build the technology once that does the seagrass restoration, and scaling that business is more of an operational problem. There's not any net new R and D we have to do to serve new contracts in that. We've already built the underlying IP. It's just like, do you have enough operators that can go in the field and operate it? And the core platform of under vehicle sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is something that can then go off and work with the folks in the energy sector or... [00:13:40] S1: What do you have to do to restore seagrass? You have to collect this.
00:13:40 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:13:40] S1: What do you have to do to restore seagrass? You have to collect this. [00:13:44] S0: First of all, you have to understand where to restore. You have to map and understand where is there seagrass, where is there not. On top of that, then you'd run a pretty rudimentary model called a habitat suitability model to say, well, based on the depth and the water clarity and these other features, we think these areas would be good for restoration. Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds, and you go and collect the seeds, and can see videos of this on the OCs Twitter account. We just posted, like, a seed collection video just like yesterday. And then you bring the seeds then to the locations that need seeds, that you've identified in the Hubdot suitability model, and then you drop... You deposit them there. And then