Will O'Brien

speaker

199 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Will O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The a16z Show · Three Startups Reinventing Critical Infrastructure · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

Yeah, it was the pinnacle of like frontier spirit and exploration for most of humanity's history.

And then it seems around the kind of 60s and 70s, we kind of forgot about it.

But like at that point in the 60s when the US was really kind of, you know, just so optimistic and so ambitious.

Well, a lot of people fail to realize or actually, you know, forget it.

is that exploring the Earth's oceans was a co-equal ambition as going to the moon.

At the 1964 World's Fair, GM had this ride, Futurama 2, that 26 million people saw this.

It was like a lunar base on one side of it, but then you also had a subsea hotel called Hotel Atlantis that had ocean floor oil rigs and submarine trains bringing critical minerals to shore.

And you had a resort down there where people could look around JFK,

you know, commissioned this plan that was effectively like the undersea equivalent for...

the undersea equivalent of a space program.

And he tripled funding year over year to explore the Earth's oceans.

And then we had people living on the sea floor.

The Navy had this program called Sea Lab, and they were sending people down to live at the bottom of the ocean.

And then, very unfortunately, we had the death of one of the members, Barry Cannon, one of the explorers kind of down there.

And that combined with the redirecting of a lot of the Navy's kind of budget and towards things like focusing on Vietnam and...

other kind of priorities led to a neglect in funding and resources to go and look at the underwater domain.

Also, the underwater domain in the Cold War became very heavily classified.

There's been books kind of released in that kind of last like decade or two talking about the, you know, the hunt for Red October, right?

And these kind of like books that are kind of talking about like all these crazy things the US subs were doing in this era.

That was all

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