Building Robots for the Ocean

CAMERON WIESE: Second event in the series, we're showcasing the really cool stuff that's happening in San Francisco. Tonight I'm joined with my good friend and now lover Will O'Brien.

WILL O’BRIEN: Not dating.

CAM: And before we sort of get into it, I'm Cameron Wiese. I think I've met a lot of you. If you've not already met, come talk to me after. I would love to meet with you, hear about sort of what you're excited about. Because the whole point of this event and the event series and stuff that we want to be doing with the World's Fair Co., which is the organization our organization wants to be doing, is to, again, do things that inspire people to go build the future. There's a lot of incredible work being done, and there are a lot of really tough, challenging problems that need to be solved.

And if we can show off the work and make it more accessible, I think we can get more people to go build, to go start companies, to go pursue new scientific endeavors, go on crazy quests and hunt treasure and all of that, which we'll talk about. I'm going to introduce Will, who is the co-founder of Ulysses. And they're a company in SoMa building autonomous robots that explore, map, and perform underwater work, including restoring seagrass, which we're going to talk about, and a lot of other really cool things that Will's gonna share with us. Before we, actually I'm gonna start us with this image here.

It's we're back in time to 1964 in New York when the World's Fair was going on. And what most of you will know about this World's Fair or your sort of relationship to it is probably through It's a Small World. So if you've been to Disneyland or Disney World, you've been on that fun ride, I'm not gonna sing the tune, I'm not gonna put that in your ear today. But that ride was introduced at the World's Fair. It was also where Walt Disney introduced the audio animatronics. So all the stuff that you see in the parks today and a lot of the robotics technology was innovated by the Disney, the Imagineering department.

There are a bunch of other really cool activations and exhibitions. At the World's Fair, you know, the Pieta was displayed to the 50 million people who visited. But there's one experience, one exhibit, one pavilion that stood out above the rest. And that was General Motors Futurama. And in Futurama, they talked about the world of tomorrow. What were the cities of the future going to look like? What was life going to be like in space? And most importantly, what was life going to be like under the ocean? And so they had these really cool sort of set pieces in the attraction, including the Hotel Atlantis. Is that right, Will?

WILL: Yep.

CAM: Sort of presented this positive, exciting vision of humanities exploring the ocean. And what most people forget is that there's a positive vision for the ocean just as ambitious and just as vibrant as the one for space. But we've largely forgotten about the ocean and the incredible wonders of the deep. And Will here has been bringing back this sort of energy to get us exploring the ocean again. He's doing it with his company, Ulysses, and we're going to talk about all that today. So let's give it up for Will for being here. So what was going on in the 1960s? Like what was his positive vision for the future?

WILL: Yeah. So I think, yeah, very interesting and underrated point is this one specifically. We all know that America was very optimistic about going to space and going and exploring that frontier. But we forget that exploring our deepest depths was a co-equal ambition, and that ocean exploration was really part of like American pop culture even. Jacques Cousteau had like one of the most famous children's TV shows of the time, and it was all about what was going on in our oceans and what was going on in the deep sea and about exploring it.

And in addition to that like he won Oscar one of the Oscar award-winning documentaries from the 60s was Jacques Cousteau a story of him living underwater. So the idea of underwater habitats the idea of actually exploration and then the idea of like actually what could we get from these deep oceans like talking about things like critical minerals, energy you know offshore oil and gas was not a concept then. And obviously oil and gas has a lot more negative connotations now, but at that time you know energy and minerals, it was all this like vision of like America is just coming off the back of kind of winning the war.

You know, the country is like advancing at like breakneck speed. And, you know, all this talk of going to space. There was also this talk of going into the ocean. And what could that give us for a growing population with all these cities kind of going gangbusters? So, yeah. And then afterwards, you know, for a variety of reasons, this kind of dream dies. There's kind of a few reasons here. You should go to the next one of this site this program called SEALAB.

So there's this program called SEALAB by the US Navy, where they were putting these habitats in different parts of the ocean and seeing what it would be like to Kind of live down there and experimenting with these kind of habitats. And very unfortunately There's an accident on one of these things that I'm in which a researcher [unclear]. That stops some of the funding then for this kind of exploration work. In addition to that around the same you have this thing, you know, we called the Cold War and you know There's a lot of, you know, the underwater is where the US really has like a lot of edge there. So there's no real interest in having that be publicly known.

So a lot of the interesting underwater work goes classified. So you know, you stop having like the best underwater engineers can't really talk publicly about their work anymore. And you know, as a lot of things, there's this broader shift in the American economy away from kind of building things in the material world more to kind of pushing numbers around. And yeah, this kind of domain gets forgotten a little bit.

CAM: I think it's funny, like, and I was sort of doing some reading here. JFK, you know, he has the famous, like, we must go to the moon speech that he gave at Rice University. But he also had some famous speeches on the ocean. Isn't that right?

WILL: Yeah. I mean, he was a famously, you know, maritime enjoyer. You know, he was a sailor in Cape Cod, has many speeches talking about the ocean and his affinity for it. And he was one of the people advocating for increasing funding for oceanography and increasing funding for mapping and that sort of thing.

CAM: Before we sort of get into some of the specifics, I think we're all sort of familiar with the ocean. Everyone's like, oh, the space, the space frontier. Oh, this is so amazing. And we sort of overlook what the ocean is able to do for us. So one, why should everyone here actually care about the ocean? I think it's something that we're all familiar with. But I don't think about the ocean on a day-to-day basis, but it runs my life. Yeah. So, like, why should everyone care? And then what is it about that sort of comparison between space and the ocean that, like, may or may not be?

WILL: Well, none of you would be alive or weren't for the ocean. We'd all, like, literally in many ways. I mean, you know, the human story starts in the ocean. You have this kind of primordial soup of which, like, life emerges from. If Earth doesn't have that kind of precursor, we don't have life here. But even more, even just today, 50% of the oxygen you breathe is produced by the ocean. So like every one, two breaths. And, you know, [unclear]. But so, I mean, you know, it's critical for that. You know, it's the biggest regulator for any climate system. You know, it's the biggest store, natural store of energy on Earth.

Obviously you know one of the largest carbon sinks and we have on Earth, so plays a very important role in the carbon cycle. So, yeah, climate. And then you know you know billions of people every day rely on it as their primary source of protein, billions of their primary source of income. So for you have many reasons and you know it's just like the in from an industrial terms it's the oldest industry like all if you look at human settlements throughout history they're always like on the coastlines, coastlines, rivers, these sorts of things So, you know, it's always been important for logistics, as a food source, for many things.

CAM: You have this term that I found interesting called the ocean tax. Can you explain that?

WILL: Yeah, I mean, it's basically just if you want to do something on land versus like doing something on the water, it just costs like orders of magnitude more to do it in like in the ocean or something like that. So it's like if you want to do something like mining on land versus mining in water, it's just like order of magnitude is more expensive. If you want to go fishing in a river versus like fishing like out in the in the sea a lot more. If you want to do gardening or ecosystem restoration on land, again orders of magnitude more expensive.

Any, take any activity and you're like you need to do in the ocean it's just like unfathomably like more expensive

CAM: What's the other like the challenges that come with that? Like, you know obviously like it's more expensive for a lot of reasons. But one of the things that I found interesting there's like the salt water corrosion but also even like you know back to this the the guys were breathing, they'd like, couldn't have oxygen. They had to breathe this like weird helium mix.

WILL: Helium, yeah. It's like... You sound crazy.

CAM: Could you just imagine like just, I'm not going to do the high pitch voice, but you know, you can imagine just like talking, like you're consuming helium all day. It would probably not be fun. Yeah, yeah.

WILL: It would get really annoyed. It would get crazy. Like you listen to like radio transmissions from SEALAB or whatever, and they're just like, it sounds like a skit show or something like that.

CAM: So what are the technical challenges?

WILL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's many things. I mean, yeah, you know, building in space is very difficult, but, you know, we've hired people from SpaceX and that sort of thing, and they're like, that's been easy compared to, like, compared to what we have to do here [unclear]. It's like they're, like, so different things. You mentioned corrosion. You know, salt water wants to just, like, eat anything with rust, pressure. And when you're underwater as well, you can't communicate through water because water's so dense and absorbs, like, all the energy. And so you can really only acoustically communicate meaning you ping it's like how dolphins and whales communicate but that can only go like max like one kilometer.

You, and yeah so there's like there's there's like a number and then like things want to grow on top of like the stuff you put down there as well. So if you have a sensor that will get fogged or something like that you need to have think of creative ways to clean that

CAM: Yeah and then you guys decided to go start a company just to do stuff in the ocean. You're crazy

WILL: Well before we knew I won't lie. This has all been so weird.

CAM: Okay, so let's go back to how you and your co-founders at Ulysses ended up here, probably starting with that surf trip that I think Jamie went on.

WILL: Yeah. So one of my co-founders was on a surf trip, and he met a marine biologist, and she was talking about her job, and then explaining to him. And at the time, he was kind of thinking through different startup ideas, and she described her job and kind of how manual it was.

You have to get on this boat you've got it's this location you take a water sample or you take a photograph of something or you know you have to [unclear] something by hand and he was just like shocked that there was no like tools um to to do that and he was like building drones for food delivery at the time, um, not really super excited about his, uh, you know, career. But he he he was he was ready to tap out. So he's thinking about any things to do, and it's like do you not have drones for this?

Um, and they're like no no well there is they're super expensive and they can't really do half the stuff we want them to do. And, you know, we just want them to rent them for a day. We don't want all these multimillion dollar vehicles. So, that led him down the rabbit hole that, like, kind of sent us.

CAM: And then what was, wasn't it like a, what happened to, so Jamie came back from the surf trip and then he did what?

WILL: Well, he, I mean, he just got.

CAM: He went into the mode, right?

WILL: Yeah, he went, he went goblin mode. I think it's the scientific term. Yeah, [unclear] every YouTube video he could get his hands on that had the word seagrass in the title and just learned a lot about underwater drones and that world and then started scheming. And there was two friends of his, one friend he'd worked before and then myself and then another guy. And yeah, we just got on calls and yeah, started talking about what this would look like as a business.

CAM: And so I think the other thing with seagrass, like what's the big deal with this stuff?

WILL: Like yeah yeah yeah the first thing that got us really hooked on the underwater stuff was um this uh this plant called sea grass which this biologist had been working on. Um, so it's this very important underwater plant, um, removes 35 times more carbon per unit area than a rainforest. There's just you know two percent of the sea floor is covered with it but holds 20% of the carbon in the ocean. And again the ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink. And it's also uh you know a primary habitat for about 20% of the world's commercially important fish stocks. So it's like very important for a lot of reasons.

Um, and we're kind of losing it at a you know a rate that's like 100x and the rate at which we can currently plant it back with. And we view this very much as like a technical problem to be solved because, like, again if you can just like reduce the cost of doing it um then feasibly people you know the existing budgets would go a lot further. So we kind of anchored on this as like if we're to solve one important job underwater it it would be this one.

And yeah, we started thinking what would like a robotic system look like that could do this job at large scale, underwater, as well as like all other kind of types of jobs. And kind of, yeah, we built the kind of platform around that kind of around that initial idea.

CAM: All right. So, but like, so you guys are out there, you know, you had experience doing drones. I know that the co-founders like Formula One, Red Bull, so you guys are like very, you know, technically savvy. But you get out there and you're like, you're deploying these drones to plant seagrass. And this is sort of your, I'd say, like the first introduction to the challenges of working with the ocean.

WILL: Yeah, definitely. There was one mission we did that first year that, you know, it just didn't go well. It was like putting it politely.

CAM: Yeah, tell us about that.

WILL: Yeah, it was like, we just, we basically kind of set some like lofty ambitions for like what we could build in the kind of time and space we could build it. And again the team was just like five people at the time, so four founders and one, one, our founding engineer. And, uh we said this ambitious thing I'm like oh yeah we'll build this robot that will plant abc you know whatever hit all these metrics and it was also like just at the time we were like moving to America as well. So, like we're like we all we were also like shipping every single piece of equipment we had in our lab over to here.

And, like then that all gets like messed up logistically and then like your time for building gets compressed from like months into weeks. And anyway we're like oh fuck, like. And then we just didn't communicate well enough to like the end customers that like oh this wasn't going to be as good as it you know we said it was going to be on day dot. And end up having this like really hellish week where you're just like going out every day with a customer you're putting the thing in the water, breaks, and you're coming back and they're just like what the fuck, you know, like.

And, like we took a bet, and you guys you know someone's but you know gone out on a limb for you. And yeah you're just getting um yeah every day there's and you're going back home and you're like trying to fix it. And, like we call them a bodge, you know, a bodge when you try to just like put a band-aid on something and you're just like bodge on top of bodge on top of bodge and issues. And then we're all just like it was just before Christmas then and we needed Christmas to kind of reset.

Um, uh, so that yeah that was definitely by far um yeah the lowest point and that was about yeah a year and a year and a bit in to the business that's

CAM: Really tough for the entire team

WILL: Yeah it was rough man yeah it was very rough yeah um

CAM: But then you know you guys emerged like what was the what's sort of the key learning for you guys on that

WILL: A few things. I think one big thing from a technical perspective just like under promise, over deliver like really just like set like really low expectations and then just this goes for everything in life actually

CAM: I know I didn't tell you we're gonna turn the lights off I didn't tell you we had this [unclear] right here.

WILL: And then, but like, yeah, just like always have like a treat or two in the bag, I think, for when you're maybe showing something off to a customer or something like that. Don't tell them everything you're going to show off to them. And then you throw one or two features in there that you didn't say you were going to do. And so I think there was like some lessons there around how you communicate to customers. Other ones around just like learning to just like budget time better, account for things going wrong. And, uh I think yeah those were but there's no substitute to like all the learnings we got in the field.

So, like we definitely have kept up our cadence of like being in the water and testing at high frequencies and like setting ambitious targets. But I think in around how you communicated is probably like um the learnings that we we got from there.

Um, but also just like there was some kind of personal like personnel things that we kind of needed to fix as well amongst my team, just like clearly defining swim lanes of like different people be like this is your job or your roles responsibility this is your thing because like for a while it was like we're kind of tripping over each other it's like I was half doing half your job you're doing half my job, you know, like. And, like I think after that we set really clear swim lanes of like you do this you do this you do this you do this these are responsibilities, and kind of um that.

So that was definitely the lowest and then like if we just look at like everything that's happened since then it's literally just been like a straight upward. Not straight upward it's kind of been like but like it's been a hill climb since then

CAM: Yeah so like what I sort of mentioned this introduction like what's Ulysses building today? Yeah, and we can probably we'll sort of transition into telling people what this yeah thing is behind us there I was like

WILL: Yeah I mean the company is basically built back for this general premise that in the future robots will do all the important work. Um, and, uh at least they're kind of boring and mundane work that humans don't want to do. And there's a lot of important work to be done in the underwater domain. And someone needs to build the company that builds the robots that does the important underwater work.

And so that's kind of what this platform is kind of built back from and there's another companion vehicle that goes with this, which is a mothership surface vehicle that drops the kids off to school and then picks them up, makes them do their homework and sends them back out the next day.

CAM: So walk us through, what is it that we're looking at?

WILL: This is Mako. This is Mako. So this is an autonomous underwater vehicle. You know, again, if we're to work back from this goal of like, all important work is done by robots in the water, then the question is like, what does that platform look like? So starting from the underwater vehicle, you know, there's a lot of different shape underwater jobs. So you kind of need to have a vehicle that can be adapted to a lot of different shaped underwater jobs. So this is like a modular drone. So like each of these components are unique and do different things. So this is where the battery is stored. This is where the brain is. These are comms masts.

This is the rear thruster that has like these fins that direct where it goes. The front has got some sensors in it. But there's certain jobs that might look a lot different. For example, for seagrass, you want some planting seagrass, you want something much wider, something a lot more like maybe a piece of agricultural equipment. So there's a bit there's a different middle frame we'd put on that but you'd still put the same kind of rear thruster and the same front and the same comms and the battery but you just need a much wider frame.

So you kind of want to build this thing that's like kind of like lego blocks that you can kind of like adapt for the different underwater jobs. Then you want to make this super cheap and mass manufacturable because the ocean is very big, so you want to build a lot of them. So, and that's not the way a lot of these robots are today. They're not cheap, and they're not mass manufacturable. So that means a lot of building things in-house sensors a lot of vertical integration

CAM: Because what's it cost for like you know the current sort of undersea deployments

WILL: Um so for some of the customers that we're serving they're kind of buying vehicles that are in around like maybe five million dollars. Um, and then the version of Mako that would replace that is maybe like $500,000. But we can make this as cheap as $50,000. It just depends on what extras package is. If you want the leather seats or if you want to, you know, you have to pay extra.

CAM: What's your favorite upgrade?

WILL: What's my favorite upgrade?

CAM: Because you've got all these Lego pieces.

WILL: The cup holder. To hold your Guinness. This is a really fun one, actually. This rear module, this new one, it's like fin control. So these all move and there's like a lot of interesting mechanics in here that would make these move that's

CAM: I think let me show the video. So we have some stuff have some footage for y'all that I ripped from YouTube and sliced together. Yes. So thank you Great Barrier Reef Foundation. So this is this is one of the earlier deployments, right? So tell us about like what's going on like what this

WILL: Yes that's to the frame this is one of the frames you were talking about now so this can just be snapped on and then we put like a seagrass planting payload on it. So, yeah, again that's like an older version of Mako, but you can see like yeah different modules pretty similar though to this one and then a frame tagged onto it. This one's called Phoenix. You can see the label on it because we literally we literally broke it one day like on the first day. And we were like oh fuck we're not gonna it's not gonna work it's not gonna work. And the lads were up until like two in the morning trying to make it work.

And then they just ended up pouring like um vodka on like one of the boards to like clean it or something like that and the whole thing woke up again. And, uh so they called it Phoenix. And, uh yeah yeah so that was that was

CAM: Arising from the vodka. Yeah, crazy an irish an irish piece of technology that's woken up by alcohol. Shock. It's very on brand and I think this is one of the newer newer models so this is a recent video um thank you our friends at s3 [unclear]

WILL: Exactly so like this one you can see, I mean, some of the software going on there, but yeah, you'll see like these thrust pods that are on the outside of the vehicle there that give it like a lot more maneuverability. So for some of the customer, we, you know, we've won contract where we're trying to cut off nets off of offshore power lines because they can be bad for wildlife. And so you need to be really accurate. So you need these like external thrust pods that just give it a lot more control.

CAM: I think one of the things that I find interesting, so we go back to the 1960s and it's like, aha, we are limited by the technology of the time. And I'm curious, like what has sort of changed? Like what are some of the cool new things that make the stuff today possible?

WILL: Yeah, many things. I mean, you know, we're here in a consumer electronics company and like Impulse and like Ulysses, like we all kind of stand on the shoulders of giants in many ways. And there's been a lot of things that make this very exciting wave of robotics today possible. I think part of this is the advances that have supported EVs, electronic vehicles, and the advances that have supported other consumer electronics like mobile phones, and then also the advances that have supported the commercial drone market.

All of these kind of systems have supply chains that have components in them that have just gotten radically cheaper because there's like 50 million aerial drones being built every year or there's you know um whatever many um million of iPhones are made every year. Um, and so those that means the cost curves of like a lot of sensors a lot of batteries and then the electronic vehicles the batteries, motors, all these things have gotten like much cheaper, much more abundant and meaning it's much easier for us to make these things and cheaper for us to make these things. So that's one thing you know for underwater because you can't communicate, you need a lot of interesting autonomy.

This needs to have a good brain because it can't talk you know and ask mom what it needs to do. So it needs to be pretty smart. And so GPUs and how you know powerful they've gotten and cheap they've gotten has been a great tailwind.

CAM: Starlink too has been a big factor for you guys right?

WILL: Absolutely for the surface vehicle then component as well the ability to send high bandwidth kind of information over Starlink yeah huge game-changer

CAM: The first video we showed was when you guys were deployed at the Great Barrier Reef right what was that like for you so I know you absolutely love Australia

WILL: I didn't get to go on the Great Barrier Reef trip but I didn't get the call up for that one but I did go to Perth in Western Australia and I've been there

CAM: So which one's where Steve Irwin from

WILL: He's from the East Coast it's maybe good I didn't go there I would have been looking for the stingray.

CAM: Which one of you?

WILL: Yes, but Australia is great. I love it there. Amazing weather, amazing people, and just like crystal clear waters as well. Great place to test the technology.

CAM: One of the things you've often talked about is the stewardship and I think the connection to Steve Irwin and his mentality. What does that look like as a result of this technology like what does stewardship look like what's your relationship with the oceans be

WILL: Yeah I think you know first it's probably important to explain the kind of concept of stewardship. But like the I mean anybody who's into nature can I get this intuitively. But the idea is that you're given this gift of the earth the earth and you can kind of do what you want with it but you have to take care of it. Um, so then the question is like yeah how does that change when you have very cheap underwater workers that you can deploy anywhere?

And yeah, I mean everything like if you could build mass-manufactured cheap surface craft to keep watch on the surface then you can just end [unclear] fishing which Chinese are doing a disturbing amount of in South America and West Africa and the the this Antarctic, near the Antarctic as well, in a very targeted, coordinated manner. Also in around Asia, Southeast Asia, they're doing a lot of this as well. So you just end that. In addition to that, underwater, there's just a lot of important work that needs to be done. So a lot of ecosystem restoration.

CAM: Let me go one step back, which is like, you guys often call yourself the ocean company. It's Ulysses, but the ocean company. What does that mean? And then maybe that'll provide greater insight as to what the actual vision is for how the earth is stewarded.

WILL: Yeah. So I suppose the kind of moniker there that we adopted was just basically this ambition that to become synonymous with the ocean in the same way that SpaceX became synonymous with space. That a company that just totally rethinks how we interact with the domain in a way that we had forgotten. And so, yeah, the idea would be that you would have tens of thousands of surface vehicles, motherships carrying these guys around the high seas and around coasts and bays and that sort of thing and other waterways. And that these guys are just kind of going and doing important jobs. And it's really, really cheap to get us to send one of these robots in to do something.

So that will largely be funded initially by, again, customers in world of defense and industry. But the benefits then flow down massively to conservation groups as well because if it only costs $10, $5 a day to rent one of these things to map a [unclear] or something like that.

CAM: Yeah. So what are some of the things that become like [unclear] when you have thousands of these working? Maybe you can tell us a little about the Seabed 2030 thing you guys are a part of.

WILL: Yeah. Yeah. We're a part of Seabed 2030, which is the effort to just like map all of the seabed. But yeah, I mean, we've still only mapped by 20% of the Earth's seabed, 20%, 25%, 30% depending on the numbers you look at. And we've mapped all of [unclear]. So how have we mapped all of [unclear], not even our own planet? Guys, you're forgetting, you missed a spot. But anyway, I mean, that's because the ocean's in the way, I suppose. And we don't really want to get rid of the ocean. That's why I wouldn't have a job.

CAM: I'm glad for all of us.

WILL: We're going to keep the ocean.

CAM: Are we sure?

WILL: But yes, because you can map it using like sonar and acoustics. You can basically ping sound at the bottom and then see what it returns. You can map it down there and you can send cameras down there to see what life is down there. So there is like an abundance. It's the biggest kind of source of discovery in the world of biology and ecology. It's the area where we kind of least understood. So if you're a scientist, it's probably where most of the interesting science will probably be done, I think, in the world of biology, if you can figure out what's down there. If you don't figure out what's down there, you can't really protect it.

And then, yeah, just like we don't really have a good barometer on how many of these different or how healthy a lot of these ecosystems are. Again, you'd be able to map them all and then restoration, like restoring these ecosystems as well.

CAM: Right now, it's all like single missions to go do stuff. This would allow us to have canvassing and get this line like you can't conserve what

WILL: You can't see. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, Planet Labs, which is another startup that's been very impactful. And what they basically enabled was like made way cheaper to kind of get geospatial data and see what was going on from space. Totally changed the game for deforestation efforts in the Amazon because they made a [unclear] that you could check literally every day was there stuff happening and [unclear], intervention so again if we can become that like Planet Labs type company that is literally taking maps in the seabed every single day, then if someone's doing a bad thing it's a lot easier to intervene to go fix it

CAM: Amazing um let's open up to a couple questions um what's got

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How much better do you think climate models get get more information about like how oceans are heating up and like what it actually looks like subsurface

WILL: Yeah massively I think like the main one is really just like the most pertinent one is like, uh, tipping points, like understanding tipping points. Um, there's a few areas in the ocean that like if you just like instrumented them well they'd have like a disproportionate impact on climate models. Like just like um you know you get like if there's like um you get like 100x the benefits from just looking at like literally this band between like Greenland and Iceland. Um, and, uh, because that just tells you a lot about the Atlantic. So I think even just like some small targeted. And there is some interesting work being done on this.

Um, there is a kind of a DARPA kind of copycat in the UK called ARIA. [unclear] doing a lot of interesting work on this. So yeah, I mean, it's just such a core part of any natural system that, again, with better instrumentation, it'll just be very impactful.

CAM: Awesome. Ruth, what you got?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It sounds like you're using your technology for a lot of good. Have you encountered any requests to use it for things that you don't think are as good? And, like, how do you handle that or kind of walk that line? I'm sure there's a lot of opportunity to do stuff in the ocean that wouldn't be great for the ocean

WILL: Yeah yeah I mean um we would have a pretty like red line on not doing things like we have like an internal charter that the [unclear] have kind of signed and saying these are things we'll do, these things we won't do. Um, so yeah I think it's just like important to have that and be resolute on it, and, like let people know. For example like you will work with the military but like we don't want to build like weapon systems or stuff like that like that that you know [unclear] human life or something like that.

Or that like we will work with like energy companies we're not like gonna like not support like the maintenance and infrastructure of like offshore infrastructure and make that cheaper because we think that's important. So, yeah we just have like we have a very distinct we have very strong like um I would say philosophical ethos ethos at Ulysses that I won't like get into but there's like a very strong like underlying um I think philosophy at Ulysses shared by the co-founders and then that that makes it a lot easier for us then to make like hard decisions on not hard decisions but decisions on what the company says yes and no to.

Um, but yeah we found it very important to have that basis and have it written down and have it like agreed upon.

CAM: Awesome. Lynn, right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It sounds like the move to SF was not the easiest thing in the world, so why build an SF?

WILL: That was fine for me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh yeah.

WILL: My two co-founders had, you know, fiancés and girlfriends at the time that [unclear], but they both got married this year, so it still worked out for them. No, it was, for me, I mean, why San Francisco?

It's kind of like there's a there's a number of ways to answer this um the it's kind of like the you know it's just kind of like the midwit meme or something like that you know it's like you just like it's just like where all the most successful companies in the world have ever been built include like you look at like the seven it's like seven of the top 10 biggest uh companies on in in the world were started in San Francisco, including Saudi Aramco. Saudi Aramco was founded in San Francisco. It's aramco is the Arabian American Company. Um, like even the biggest country like you know a company like [unclear] like started here.

Um, so, uh, yeah just like if it ain't broke, don't fix it, you know. Um I ever all the big companies have done this they've been able to build hardware, software. Um, and it's also just a beautiful place to live so

CAM: Yeah awesome um good question

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah I am I was wondering with the legacy industry [unclear] and how dispersed it is internationally. Have you found any obstacles with that? Have you had like a focus in a specific region of the world?

WILL: Yeah, we mainly have worked to date in Australia and the US. For one-off kind of jobs and deployments that we've kind of been doing a lot of in the last kind of two, three years, it's been fine. But I think going forward as we were kind of entering this stage of business where it's kind of scaling, it's the growth stage of a business now, we're going to have to pick a few areas to just like double down on. So the US will be kind of, I think the main one that we'll focus on. There's a lot to do with Maritime here and then go from there. And then, yeah.

CAM: What are some of those things like on that question that you're most excited to like enable?

WILL: Like things in the US?

CAM: Yeah.

WILL: I think there's a lot. We've got three main business lines at Ulysses. We've got the nature one, which we've spoken a lot about. And there's some very exciting work there. We're starting some work in Richardson's Bay pretty soon, doing mapping of the eelgrass kind of meadows there and quantifying that. And hopefully that will lead to restoration work in Richardson's Bay over in Sausalito pretty soon. So that's very exciting. But yeah, there's a lot of them. This year has been obviously in the world of defense, the kind of the Strait of Hormuz showed us all how important the underwater domain is.

America was kind of pretty much held kind of at, you know, in a chokehold because this country was able to shut down these major shipping lanes. That doesn't seem ideal for kind of the long-run stability of global economy, for kind of global peace and cooperation. Operations. So we're thinking a lot about how these could be used to avoid situations like that and do things like find mines, neutralize them. That's a use case I'm very excited about. Um, because that that the autonomy stack in that really ports over to a lot of interesting things.

If you can build something that can find things underwater and then you know um I mean like cover like large areas um very quickly um you can find you can do interesting things like find treasure very treasure you know find archaeological digs like I don't I don't think people appreciate like the treasure situation. They, like every every like week I pretty much get an email from some crackpot being like I know where the treasure is in the ocean. Like, please just give me one robot I'm like I you know I've talked to some of these guys

CAM: Oh my god okay tell us about this

WILL: They're hilarious. I always take these calls because they're just so funny. I'm like I really do you know um but there's literally there's literally billions of dollars of like lost treasure out in the ocean. Um, there is um a ton in around South America. Um, you know the obviously the the Portuguese and the Spanish were coming and taking now you know probably not rightfully a lot of this like gold and treasures and emeralds from from South America and bringing it back but a lot of them got, you know, lost. Um, so there's literally billions of dollars of wrecks there um But then there's also a lot of archaeological discovery to be made still.

And there's potentially the lost story of Atlantis, right? We have this kind of cultural memory of cities that were lost to the underwater domain. I think there's many discoveries.

CAM: What's been something that's either come through one of those crackpot conversations or some other conversation where you're like, that's made you think differently about?

WILL: There was a hedge fund manager in the UK who last year made more money from his treasure hunting operation than his hedge fund. That's wild. That's wild.

CAM: So if any of you are in hedge funds, I'm sure you can pivot. All right, what else you got? Right there. Yeah, go for it.

WILL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just a stupid, technical question. [unclear] Like you obviously can't use GPS. I assume we haven't mapped the whole ocean floor. So like technically, how do you guys do that?

WILL: Yeah, so when you're at the surface, these two GPS antenna will take a location. And then from there, you're basically using an inertial navigation system to be like, well, I took one step forward and one step down and one step left, and you add those things together. And then it's like, okay, that gives you your relative positioning to the GPS location you were initially. And then basically the question is just like, how much drift is there in that system? And the drift, there's a variety of different sensors you can use, all in varying cost and kind of ease to procure. And there's import controls on the very advanced ones for obvious reasons. So yeah.

And then there's another type of sensor then as well that you see here, which is another navigation thing. And that's called a Doppler velocity logger. So that will actually, when you have contact with the seabed, it'll ping off the seabed. And then as you move, it measures the Doppler shift. And the Doppler shift is an indicator of what speed you're moving at. And then if you know what speed, you know what distance you are and what direction you're going as well.

CAM: Awesome. Time for two more. You, sir. What you got?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mainly, if you spend much time looking at the whole residential model, where you don't have to pay for the [unclear] of the machine, it's like staying near that piece of infrastructure, that piece of whatever it is that needs to be maintained or observed stays there and then you get rid of that [unclear] in the ocean.

WILL: Yeah, 100%. So that was like, I kind of got through like half of the different like technical things that are part of the vision, but part of it is like making these cheap, mass manufacturable, modular, but another part of it is the surface craft.

And I think that's one of the things that [unclear] is unique is that we have a surface vehicle that goes with this vehicle that is the mothership that can drop a very long anchor and stay out at sea for long periods of time or can it's like a catamaran hull meaning it's very stable in the water and it can stay out in high sea states um and yeah and then just like you just basically have like what you know is like a floating hotel for the underwater vehicles that can just like stay out there with them for long periods of time and for months on end.

So that's another part of the stack that's like very important to us, that, like. And then you know more generally I think what we see happening is you just do end up at a point where you have like floating settlements and cities, potentially. And, like at least for for like you you have something that look like the next generation of like oil rigs. Um, I think it's like likely that it probably starts as like data centers out there. Um, but then like we're kind of like paying them um to you know take some of their um energy or something like that and recharge these things.

But, yeah, I think definitely you you move away in the long arc of um you know the maritime away from just like expedition-based activities to like more residential. It's like when you were pursuing the you know the last frontier in America which is even the American West you know initially it was just like we're going out for expeditions to the West. Then you set up settlements then you start making money and you build something around them. When you start making money in a location people just want to stay there. [unclear] So, yeah I think when you start making like for example there's like 17 trillion dollars of critical minerals in the [unclear].

If people start doing that there will be settlements out there. Like, no chance. Like, you're not gonna fit them all on, like, the Solomon Islands. You literally physically couldn't.

CAM: Is this how we get Seasteads?

WILL: I think so. I think it looks like something like that. But it's not gonna be... I don't think it's gonna be, like, the kind of utopian vision. I think it's, you know, it's gonna look more like maybe like a, you know, like...

CAM: Like Alaska, like...

WILL: Like an all-boys kind of Catholic school or something like that, you know, like, smelly, you know, boy working, you know, it's like men at sea. It's not like gonna be this rosy, like [unclear], you know, happy clappy vision. It's like gonna be a little bit more,

CAM: Yeah, it's like a frontier, you know,

WILL: It's more the frontier, more robust. I mean, but maybe there's not, maybe it's not even that, maybe it's just like we have so many robots at that point, like it's just settlements for the robots or something like that, you know, and there's actually very few people out there.

CAM: What are, so I have two things to close this out. What are some of the things that you want to see other people building sort of on the, like in the ocean? So if someone here is like, I want to go do stuff in the ocean, if they're, I mean, they should probably go work for Ulysses. And if they don't, they're like, they want to go build something. What are some of the really interesting opportunities?

WILL: I think what is really interesting are things like long range communications underwater, comms in general underwater is very interesting. I think thinking about what does maybe something that like the supporting infrastructure that would basically support these things. Like one thing I think a lot of people are thinking today about drones and robotics and that sort of thing. And I think that's very fair. But I think that people are thinking of building Ford, like companies like Ford, but they're not thinking about building the gas stations that supported Ford, you know, like these accessory pieces of infrastructure that support the role of robotics.

Not just like another AI model fucking bullshit, you know, that's going to like, sorry if we've anyone under 18, but like, you know, like, I just so done with these, these kind of, you know, grifts. There's very interesting companies to build this concept of gas stations, I think, for robotics. I think this is like something that's like rich. I think there's like, so like things that support energy, things that do comms, things that transport, to transport these sorts of like supporting infrastructure. Again, if you like, yeah, I think this is probably where you're not seeing enough brain direction going. So I would think about that. I'd be happy to give anybody my thoughts on what that looks like for us.

But yeah, charging stations, comms, networks, that kind of thing.

CAM: Awesome. Let's go 10, 20 years into the future when Ulysses has these Mako's deployed, you guys are wildly successful, more so than you already are. What are the things that most excite you and you think would most excite everybody in this about like again what's going to be possible and like what what our lives look like

WILL: Yeah I think there's like an immense amount of discovery, like scientific and otherwise, like biological, archaeological, historical all these sorts of things that will happen that will just be like you know kind of headline on the New York Times level of like wow. Um, so I think that would be cool. Um, you know I'm a sucker for like aliens, and, like, let's do it. Yeah you know there's a lot of I mean I don't know if how many people are familiar with like the stuff the US government has released on and UFOs, aliens but they've got like all these crazy videos of them basically just going into the ocean.

Um, like there's one off the USS Nimitz and it's just like you know going at like crazy speed doing all these things it looks like a Tic Tac, and then it just like dumps into the water, and it's It's gone. What? Where did it go?

CAM: Where's it going?

WILL: Exactly. It's kind of like, okay, well, we literally have this instrumentation network or whatever. What do we catch things underwater or whatever? Like, the trap cams, the wildlife cams.

CAM: The wildlife cams are underwater.

WILL: But I think that's very interesting. I think all the nature stuff we talked about, the ramifications there, very interesting. Yeah, I think like supporting industry as well at sea, I think it's something I'm very like just excited and passionate about. There's a lot of things the ocean can give us. And yeah.

CAM: I think the thing that gets me, like I always think about like we don't view the ocean as a frontier as much as we should. And the work that you guys are doing is sort of like reintroducing it to everybody. How do we stir the imagination and get people like, oh, we should build undersea hotels and, you know, cool giant barges and seasteads and be mapping the ocean floor and discovering new possibilities. So thank you, sir, for joining us. Thank you for everything you're doing, [unclear]. For being here. Let's give Will a round of applause. I would also be remiss if I did not thank the incredible people who helped make this happen.

Will, we've already thanked, so you get yours already. Impulse for hosting us in this amazing office. Thank you to Lynn for serving tea. And then I would like to thank 1517, including Danielle right here, for all their support in making this happen. They inspire me every day to go build a future. And Danielle's an amazing human being, and they're great. So if you want to start a company or you want resources, 1517 is this spot. I think that wraps up our second event here. Thank you all so much again for coming out. So give yourselves a round of applause for Danielle.

And I think we'll stick around for a little bit and then try and get Phil home before bedtime at 9 o'clock. So feel free to stick around, mingle, finish the snacks and the brownies because I don't want to eat them all. So help me out. And then...

WILL: Oh, terrible. Oh, God, I know.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [unclear]

CAM: Yeah, thank you all so much. It was amazing. Thank you.