Building The World's Most Powerful Satellites w/ Will Marshall | EP #90

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You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options or let's do a little research. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart information is power. Data is the new oil. It's the thing that's going to power all the industries. You're building a system that makes humanity able to smartly manage resources. A bit like the eye system with the visual cortex, helps humans make smart decisions.

It's awe inspiring and it's important for people to understand what's coming.

So I think of it as awareness to action. That's the phase change that we're going from. And action requires detailed tools and information that's timely and relevant to your day to day life. And just like the mainframe computer, the desktop revolution, it's going to change the whole whole dynamics of what's possible in space. And this is just the beginning.

Everybody, Peter here.

Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a dear friend, may I say an old dear friend. We've been friends for over a couple of decades. Dr. Will Marshall. Will, good to see you buddy.

Great to be on.

Yeah. No, so listen, you are, you got a massive moonshot and it really, you know, when I think of you I think about raster scanning the planet. It's about being able to know anything I want, anytime I want, anywhere I want and really understanding the vibrancy, the problems, the opportunities globally. So let's Begin with a quick overview of what is Planet Labs. And then I want to get into what is your 10, 20, 30 year vision for Planet Labs. Because it's audacious and it truly is a moonshot.

Yeah, well, certainly look, Planet, in short, is a company. We have 200 satellites that image the entire landmass of the Earth every day. So it's a bit like if you go into Google and click on the satellite imagery layer, except that image is typically a few years old. We've got today and yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. Basically 2,500 images now on average for every point of the la mass of the Earth, documenting immense change going on and powering AI tools to sit on top that enable us to take smarter care of the planet resources upon it. But in many ways we started as a space company, now we're a data company. And that's the cool thing that's going on now, space companies, it's less about the rockets and the satellites and more and more about the data and how it can totally transform the earth economy. And that's, that's the sort of exciting phase we're in.

And I guess, you know, as a public company now, it's, the company's name is Planet. It used to be Planet Labs. Back in the early days, it's all referred to as Planet. And it's amazing. You know, we're going to talk about the stories of how you went from literally a phone satellite to now 200 satellites. I think the largest imaging, private imaging collection of satellites. Maybe the NRO has more, I don't know, maybe they use yours, who knows? You've got more than the NRO and more than the government's. Yeah, amazing. That's awesome. And an incredible journey. I mean, buying satellites from Google, getting Eric Schmidt and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the entire group there, and Steve Jurvitan, one of the most incredible venture capitalists in the field to back you as a 20 something year old. So I want to tell all that story and it really, the ups, the downs and the audacity of the moonshot you've not only planned but built. But I want to go someplace else first because I've heard you describe this and it's, and it's awe inspiring and it's important for people to understand what's coming, what is, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, what's your vision of what Planet is doing and what's possible for humanity with the tech that you're building.

Well, look, it's a big question, but I really think that we have the tools at our disposal now to manage the planet in a very different way. We've got a lot of challenges, climate change and we can talk about biodiversity loss and all these things. But more broadly, we're on a spaceship hurtling around the sun and we were taking data of it once a month, once a year. And how the heck are you managing that? It's a bit like, you know, I think we were having a conversation with our grandchildren. Like then they'll say, hey, how did you manage the planet before you measured it regularly? Of course the answer was not very well, you know, and, and you obviously can't be a smart actor without data. I mean, as a space geek, I'll tell you a little space story. When you put satellites into space, you obviously try to measure them faster than the timescale. They change. Like if they're spinning around once every minute, you better measure that spin faster than once a minute. Like if you take a data point once a minute, you ain't gonna stop the spin, right? You need to measure it faster. We are all on the spaceship, 8 billion astronauts hurtling around the sun. And you know, we have impact on that planet on days and weeks. Timescale of human activity, how do we manage that if we're not taking information, if we're not taking data points on that sort of timescale. So it's a stands to reason that you can help the planet without that sort of data, as they like to say, you can't manage what you don't measure. So the vision in many ways is to give everyone the tools that enables us to make smart day to day decisions based on the physical understanding of what's going on on the planet. I actually did a TED talk which extended it just beyond just the imagery of the Earth. It's the AI on top that then enables you to sort of have a query of Earth. This is in 2018. And you know, in modern pollens it'll be like Planet GPT. You know, what is it that you should just be like you, you can text search the Internet and text now in, in, in human readable form if you like what's going on and it gives you human readable answers. You should be able to do that for the Earth. How many trees are there being cut down? The Amazon, where are those trees? What's the plot versus time? What's happening in my neighborhood? Who's doing what, why? How are the parks doing? How do they need help? What do we need to do to clear up the pollution? Where's the pollution come from? You know, all these challenges, humans should be able to have that at their fingertips and without having to have a PhD in space satellite imagery processing in order to get that right. Just like we are doing again. So, you know, AI companies have figured out how to turn the text of the Internet first into a searchable place that was Google. And now into this human readable way of interacting.

I love Planet GPT. It's a fantastic, it's a fantastic term. You should put that out there more. So I love the idea that at any time you can query what's going on on the surface of the earth and get an answer and, and do it at a variety of spectral information and resolutions. So you have 200 satellites today? Roughly, yes. What do you, you know, if you were, you're setting your, you're a moonshot entrepreneur a decade from now or two decades from now, what do you imagine to create Planet GPT, where you've got information at a regular basis at, you know, high resolution. What do you, what do you want to, where do you want to get to? What's your vision?

Well, I mean on the data side I think we're going to, in the satellite piece, we're going to get more and more accurate data. So higher resolution, smaller pixel size.

Yeah. What's the resolution today?

Well, our daily scan is at 3 meter resolution. Our highest resolution imagery is at 50 centimeters. So we have a fleet of 20 satellites that can zoom in anywhere. And actually it's kind of fun to think of it like how the human high works, which is you have peripheral vision in much of your visual field. You only have high resolution in a tiny bit in the center and, and actually it's black and white beyond a certain point in your peripheral. But you're very good at change detection and if there's something changes, your visual cortex goes, hey guys, get that high res over here. And then you turn your eyes or your head, right. So we have the scan which looks at the whole peripheral at 3 meter resolution, the whole planet. And then we have the high res that can zoom in on any particular piece that changes. So we call that system Fovea, a bit like the, inspired by the eye. And the visual cortex is of course the AI that looks at the scan, finds the changes, finds what's interesting in the changes, blocks out everything else and then coordinates what we should do as a result of that, including taking higher resolution imagery, but also making decisions day to day. Right. Oh, that's a threat. This is just a cloud, you know, no big deal. And so think of it that way. I think we're building a system that makes humanity able to smartly manage resources. A bit like the eye system with the visual cortex, helps humans make smart decisions.

Do you remember calling me during COVID one night, really excited? I think I just had a power outage in the home. And you're on the phone giving me your vision of where I guess now calling it Planet GPT, where it was going. And I was just, it was the most compelling vision I've heard about both giving our children the tools to manage the planet. But it's also a multi trillion dollar business opportunity. Can you dive in a little bit more? So, so do you think we'll have thousands of satellites? Do you think we'll have higher resolution?

Yeah, I think, I think it will get more and more real time and higher resolution. So maybe, you know, we'll definitely get sub meter daily scan, but I think we get more like hourly, maybe less. We'll also have other spectral bands. So we talk about going up in spatial resolution, temporal resolution, so how frequently and spectral resolution, how many spectral bands. And that's less useful for the human eye. But it's an absolute field day for the algorithms because they can use different colors to distinguish between things. I mean, even down to, I mean we're just about to launch some hyperspectral satellites that have 400 spectral bands that enable us literally you can tell not just that it's a green car, it's a green car that comes from this factory over here because that's the only factory that produces that shade of green.

You know, you can also look at what the oil reserves are of a country by virtue of the thermal heating of the oil tanks.

Because, well, you certainly can level the levels of the tanks. We can even do that today. But I mean, even like, I mean, one of the most wicked problems of the Earth is where's all the life, what different forms are, where we can actually tell species type of the trees or the grasses or the corals underneath the sea down to a certain depth and so on, all automatically. And this is a field day, as I said, for AI because it can pull out all of these things, right, and help us understand again the planet.

So we're both Trekkies. And so when the starship Enterprise sort of goes into orbit around the planet and Captain Kirk tells Spock to scan the planet, and he says, we got these many life forms here, I mean, that's basically what you're enabling.

Totally, totally.

Now, I mean, talk about the idea of what industries and businesses this enables. So can I, can I just paint the picture one second? So thousands of satellites. Yes.

Yeah, I think that's right, yeah.

Thousands of satellites with each satellite has how many sensors on it?

Yeah, a few. I mean, it doesn't need to be many. I mean, it's mainly through one telescope, but different spectral regions. Yeah.

And all of this is being fed into a data layer that is constantly being analyzed by AI. This is about early detection of disasters, it's about early detection of opportunities, it's about discovery, it's science, it's definitely industry, it's hedge funds, managing hedge funds, it's everything. I mean, go give me an understanding of how big this opportunity is and how does it change the way we do business today? Because it's massive.

Well, I mean, information is power. I mean, the economist said data is the new oil. It's the thing that's going to power all the industries. By the way, when a little fun fact. If you look at all the tech giants and what they're doing with AI, they're all open sourcing the AI code. They're all open sourcing exactly 0 of the data. Because the asset that they have that's unique is always the data, not the algorithms or less the algorithms than the data. And that's why. So when you think of AI, where to invest in an AI company who's got the interesting data, because that's going to be where you feel. So data is the new oil. It powers all the industries. Hopefully it's not dirty like oil, but it is analytic in the sense that it, it powers all these different energy oils, powers all these different industries. Data is going to power all those industries as well. If you're in transportation, it's going to make more efficient transportation. If you're in agriculture, it's going to make more efficient agriculture. If you're in government, it's going to make more efficient government. If you're in, you know, you just race across all the things. Yes. Hedge funds, insurance, you know, and I can get more concrete. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. I think of the world as, you know, broadly undergoing three transformations today. One is digital transformation. That's the transition of industries to help them digitize, bring their systems into information world such that they can then be more efficient. The second is sustainability. And we've got to transition to have a sustainable economy that doesn't blow up the boundaries of the planet. Obviously does so in a way that we don't further heat the planet and so on. And the third is we've got to do all of that with having good peace and security geopolitically. And what we need for all three of those factors is transparency and accountability of what goes on. So everyone needs to know and understand their supply chains for supply chain risk, for security, for sustainability. But let me get a little bit more concrete. Digital transformation. Take agriculture. We image every farmer's field on the earth every day. That's roughly a quarter of the landmass of the planet as agricultural land. Every single farmer's field, we can tell in each 3 minus 3 box what crop is it. Is it corn, wheat, soil, how well is it doing, what practices the farmer used and what they should do next, whether they should add water, the soil is too dry, we can actually tell the soil moisture level. Is the crop in need of fertilizer, herbicide or not? Is they putting too much so that is causing runoff that you could then save. In total, we think that we can improve crop yields by at least 20% and decrease use of fertilizer and other things and other inputs by 20% as well. A 40% increase to efficiency over trillion dollar sector, that's a big deal. I could go through industry on digital transformation. Then there's sustainability transformation here. We need to help ourselves to manage the planet. I'll give you an example from just last year, Brazil. We do a weekly image of a scan for new road starts in the Brazilian Amazon, the whole Brazilian Amazon, once per week. And if we find a new road, it's a sign of early sign of either illegal deforestation because they put in these logging roads before they then get a treat, or illegal narcotics or illegal mining. We provide these day, these weekly alerts to the federal police in Brazil. They go out, they Sent Last year 3000 expeditions based on our alerts. And they in total reduced deforestation in Brazil by 55% in one year on the back of this system. And they confiscated $2 billion worth of assets.

I hope you got a commission on that.

Well, we kind of did, yeah. I mean that was hard sale. It wasn't actually done that. But I mean there's great roi. And so that's sustainability transformation. And then peace and security is where we help countries. Like what's happening in Ukraine right now. We did a building damage assessment across all of Ukraine, help helping everyone to understand what's it going to cost to rebuild. We did an assessment of where the crops and how well the crops are doing for food security for that country and also for the world, because it's a breadbasket for the world. We did an assessment of how the Russians are stealing grain, where they're taking it to. You know, there's all this stuff that we can help operationally and in certain broader humanitarian sense. And finally also in terms of hearts and minds, every time Russia says, oh, we don't bomb civilian targets, we have shared with the New York Times where they bombed civilian targets that last, you know, the schools and the hospitals. It's accountability that we can share this because it's not a classified system owned by the nro. You know, we can share that data with news media where it's appropriate to shed light on what's going on and hold those actors accountable. This is. Transparency equals accountability. And so these are the three sort of major areas we can help in a couple of specific.

I love that I speak about the fact that, that people behave differently when they're being watched. That, you know, you put a camera in front of the dictator and the camera, the dictator changes their behavior. You put drones over poachers going after anoceros and the poachers go away. And so this is complete and total transparency and forced accountability. I remember you speaking about a vision of the future of like brand new layers of googleable data or, you know, geminiable or chatgptable data where I think I said queryable. Yeah. Where a school kid can, can literally can go and discover whatever they want. Can you speak a little bit about that information layer on top of the planet and what that means?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right the way I broadly think about it actually. And you've taken it more into the sort of consciousness realm. I mean, when humans went to the moon and looked back and saw the earth, we helped up level human spirit to say, hey, we're on a planet, it's fragile. It made to a phase change in human consciousness in layer of atmosphere protecting us from the vacuum of space, the coldness of space. That's, you know, it was daunting, but it helped sort of give birth to the green movement. I think we're on the verge of living things. We've got a big mirror to look ourselves in the face. That webcam, it's more of a mirror back to ourselves. Right. And with that it's less about. We're already aware that we're on a planet that now it's enabling us to take smarter action because everyone can see everything. Right. It's, it's so. I Think of it as awareness to action. That's the phase change that we're going from. And action requires detailed tools and information that's, that's timely and relevant to your day to day life Anyway, you know, going, going to your journey. For a child, think about the exploration that can be done on this planet. I love sci fi like you do. You're talking about Star Trek, but sci fi reality is fucking amazing. It's, you know, I get to, I get, I barely get time for sci fi because there's so many sci facts that I just get boggled by. Right. The Earth is full of those. You look around, our planet is constantly changing. I look at our imagery every day and you see rivers changing, you see people harvest things, you see boats move. You see all this stuff happening. The Earth is dynamic. We have this false impression. The Earth is a static place because we were used to maps. Whether it's online or physical, that's not how the world works. The Earth is dynamic. What an exploration. Go, go, go, go. Pile in everyone.

It's Peter. In a few weeks, I'm gathering an incredible group of AI leaders, including Ray Kurzweil, Eric Schmidt, Mustafa Suleiman, Imad Mustak, Michael Saylor and others at my private Abundance Summit to discuss the impact of AI on our lives, our businesses and, and the world. The Abundance Summit is a private community open to extraordinary moonshot entrepreneurs. It's Singularity University's highest level program and it's not for everyone. If you're at the top of your game and you want to learn more about this program, click on the link below to be considered. Okay, let's go back to the episode. Enjoy. For everybody listening. Will is an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur, an exponential entrepreneur, and we met each other in the space community. God, when were the Space Gen conferences? It was.

Yeah, I mean, I think we met in 1999 in that Vienna conference. And then 2001-2000-2001-2002. I don't know, we definitely met in, I think 1999 was when we met. So 25 years ago. Yeah, that's pretty ancient. At this time, I don't know, I.

Still feel like a kid. And you're still playing with toys, so. But they're world changing toys and I want to dive into the journey.

Right.

I keep on reminding people that, you know, these moonshots that entrepreneurs are taking are not overnight successes. They're typically overnight successes after 10, 11 years of hard work.

Exactly.

And I want to go back to your story. I'd like you to share the story, the ups and the downs and those pivotal moments and just to put some numbers on it, Planet was founded circa 2010, I think, and then you went public in 2021. So you can go and find Planet. Planet on the top of my ticker list on my phone. You can go find Planet on the Nasdaq. And it's now 2024. So it's been a 14 year journey from startup to today. And amazing what you built. But let's go back. So you and I met each other again back on the campus of NASA Ames at Singularity University. And what was that formative moment like for you and your co founders?

Yeah, I mean, look, the thing that had happened was that my colleague at NASA had kept on holding up his phone. This is a early smartphone in 2000.

Was it a Google, Google phone?

I don't know. And in his specific case, I don't know. But he would say, look, this has got most of what a satellite has. If you think about what's in a phone. It's got cameras, it's got gps, it's got rate gyros, it's got accelerometers, it's got processors, radios. I mean, it's just crazy. All the stuff that is stuffed in here and it costs 500, 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks. Meanwhile, NASA is building these huge satellites. They also have roughly the same list of things, but they cost 500 million bucks or a billion bucks. And the quick thing, we were like, what are those extra six zeros doing for us? And I'm not saying they're not nothing. No one was saying it's nothing. It's lower risk, it's bigger telescope, it's better sensor. But it's kind of remarkable how much stuff is fit into this little box. And we wanted to leverage that. You know, NASA was very much in the mindset of inventing everything for itself. Because you know what it had to send a man to the moon? Well, we didn't have computers, so we had to invent microcomputers. We didn't have, you know, solar panels. So we invent soda. You know, all that. We have to build everything from scratch. Well, guess what? The top R and D dollars aren't in NASA anymore. They're at Google, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, all the rest. And so this is learning to follow for the space industry. Not a comfortable place for the space industry. We're used to leading from the front. We were a little bit annoyed by this whole idea of having to follow. But the fact is that the billions of dollars that have gone into miniaturization of electronics was super useful for space. So this is learning to take those, stuff them into much smaller satellites, much lower costs, but have much higher cost performance. That is data per unit dollar. And we estimate that that has changed orders of magnitude because of ours and others efforts. I mean, at least three orders of magnitude. And that is a bit like the mainframe computer to desktop computer revolution, but for space. And just like the mainframe computer, the desktop revolution, it's going to change the whole dynamics of what's possible in space. And this is just the beginning. We're seeing communication satellites and earth imaging satellites take off. Right. But there's going to be others as well. Better GPS navigation systems, you're going to see better radar systems, better. So many things are going to take off because of the fact that you've got much more capability per dollar. Also, launch costs have come down about 4x in the same period. So that has helped as well. Although a common misconception I think is that that's the dominant thing that's led to this. Actually it's kind of the other way around. Satellites miniaturizing has enabled us to put much more capability per kilogram. That's going up and that has changed the demand for going up, which enables us to bring the cost down. I would say it's much more that way around than the other way around. We still benefit and they add on to one another. But the, you know, the thousand x in the space industry that's happened is not to do with the launch. It's to do with the miniaturization and increasing capabilities performance of satellites per unit.

Dollar per unit kilogram.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. The specific performance of satellites has gone through the route. That phase change enables lots of different applications and most of them in the field of some sort of data, because you're remote. It's all about collecting data or transmitting data. And just in the last five years we've seen more than a tenfold increase in amount of data from space and more than a tenfold increase in the amount of data around orbit. Because with communication satellites enabling communication on one side of the planet to the other, that's a total revolution, that 10x in both of those areas. So the upshot of the space revolution is a data revolution.

So. But there was that moment. Was it Robby, who was your co founder at that time?

Chris Boschausen.

Yeah. And both great. Amazing. How old were you guys when you.

Were so we were late 20s when we started that and we were like, okay, so phones, they work. Let's put them in a vacuum. Let's stick them on the side of a rocket.

I remember that conversation. I remember you were saying, we stick this thing in the vacuum chamber and see if it still works afterwards.

Yeah, we did. It was funny because, I mean, that's like going back to the womb for these guys because actually the electronics are made in a vacuum. You know, that's what people don't appreciate. And they're made like. I mean, little, like, brick shithouses. These things. You can. They still work.

They fall out of airplanes, they land.

I mean, they're kind of robust. So we stuck it on the side of a rocket. It was a still work. We eventually put three into. Into orbit. I almost got fired by Pete Warden because I hadn't really got all the things in a row to do that. I remember that. Didn't know that we were doing this and kind of freaked out when they found out. But we were like, no, this is going to be cool. We're going to show that consumer electronics can work in space, and that can change the whole cost equation here. So, yeah, we launched three phones into space. They worked. They were tumbling around.

So I want you to back up a second here. So you have the idea. You and Robbie and Chris start. Was it Planet Labs at the beginning?

Yeah. Well, no, this. This phone project was at NASA. This was.

This was an internal NASA project.

Internal NASA project.

Government funding, just to see. And by the way. Yeah. Stolen work hours, if you would, Nights and weekends. And so you send up three, and it works.

And then they're tumbling around taking pictures. We got people with YAGI antennas all around the world picking up the packets. Because we don't have ground stations. They send us the packets. We reconfigure these pictures and like, okay, we take pictures from space for a few thousand dollars, not a few bazillion dollars. So, okay, this is kind of interesting. Maybe we should leave NASA and do something like this. I mean, the cameras on this wasn't the right kind of images. It was more proof of principle. It was a proof of principle that this technology could work in space. So then, yeah, we left NASA to start Planet. Actually, it's initially called Cosmogia a few years in. And we launched then.

So where'd you go first? Was Steve your first investor then?

Yeah, so he was. We started building and launching our satellite. First satellite. We put the deposit down on a rocket with our own pocket money.

Which rocket was that?

Huh? There was an Antares rocket And we actually. One on Antares, one on a Soyuz wouldn't be popular these days. We're not meant to use the Russians, but then we could and we did. And so we put the deposit down, but there was no way we were going to afford the main cost of the launch. And, and so we were like, oh shit, we need to get some money. That was when I was reminded because one of the times we were launching one of these phone sats, it was in the Nevada Black Rock desert, right where they have Burning Man. And when there's not Burning man, there's sometimes rocket. Amateur rocketeers go up there and launch things into space because there's a, there's a very high airspace airspace so they can do that. And of course there's no one around and they. So we were up there and, and Steve was helping us to put our rocket together or something. I didn't know who he was, but he blogged about what we did the next day. And that was when Pete found out about our phone set project and almost fired me because he was like, I just read you guys are putting phones in space. And we were like okay, calm down, it's gonna be fine.

For those who don't know, Pete Worden was the head of NASA. Ames, he was a general in the Air Force. He was part of the Strategic Defense Initiative back in the 80s under Reagan. A dear co conspirator in the entire space flight revolution and a dear friend.

And because I'm a bit of a peace loving hippie, I prefer peace in space, not SDI in space. I think I won because he was working at NASA. He says he won because I work for him or something like that anyway. But yeah, Robbie, Chris and I said at this point, let's spin this out as a company. We took our core spacecraft team, we replaced everyone at NASA first because we wanted to do good by the. By NASA. And, and we took our core team, Steve kindly having routed us out. He went to him and said come on, you got to give us some money for this. And he was like okay, you got just. You guys are just crazy enough. I've only done one space investment before it just a year or two earlier invested in SpaceX first money into SpaceX.

And Steve Jobson, one of those brilliant venture capitalists on the board of SpaceX, had been on the board of Tesla and has the most magnificent space collectibles collection of Russian and NASA components and hardware and meteorites and everything. Yeah, he's great. How much did you get in the first round? Do you remember?

Oh, that was yeah, 3 million C. Then he led also the A, which is another 12 million I want to say. And. But that also had some participation from other people. So did the seed. He led the first two and then the B was led by Yuri Milner. 50 million put in. No, he put in 30 or 50 or something. And then the C round was Data Collective and International Finance Corporation and a bunch of others. And then D round was essentially instigated because we bought the satellite arm of Google. Google then became slow it down. So during 8km a second. It's the nature of satellites.

So you know, in that window time, this is 2010 to 2016, 18 time frame. Both of us were close friends with, with Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt where you were on the campus there of, of NASA Ames, which is where Google keeps their airplanes. And I had Singular University there. And talk about sort of the first time you connected with the Google guys and started talking about orbiting satellites and things like that.

Yeah, I mean, well, it was a little bit random. In 2006 or 7 when I first got to Ames, I like hiking on the weekends and I hiked from my house where we started Planet and did the first satellite in the garage to the sea, which turns out to be quite a hike. And I haven't really exactly planned it out with my girlfriend at the time. About an 80 kilometer, 50 mile hike two day from there to the sea. So basically over the mountains to Big Basin and then down to the sea. By the time we got there there was no. There was only one bus a day and it left. We just missed it. Cell phones didn't work there because we're in middle of nowhere. So we get to this beach and we're like, damn, how exactly are we going to get out of here? And my girlfriend was basically divorcing me at this point, so that's a bad plan. Anyway, so we're coming down to this beach and I say, well, I hope these guys are friendly because there's three people on the beach kite surfing and one of them turns out to be a friend of mine called Don Montague who is a wonderful guy and helped to teach Sergey and Larry to kite so stuff. And it was. The other two people were Sergey and Larry and I. I when they came in off their boards I was like, oh, hi Don, great to see you. Can you give me a lift home? And he was like, no, I'm not going your way. But these guys are. I'm in the car with my girlfriend and Sergey and Larry who are giving me a ride home now. And they're like, can you stop? Can we stop for dinner? I was like of course, sure, That's. Let's stop for dinner. And we get chatting and my girlfriend's like, what do you guys do? And they're like we work at Google. How they put it? And I was like, wait a second. Their name's Larry and Sergey and they work at Google. Okay, I think I know who this is. And. And she's like, well, what do you do exactly at Google? And they're like, well, you know, set board strategy or something. I'm kicking around to the table going, I think these are the guys that started it anyway, became friends with those guys early on and they got very interested in space and came around to see our lunar lander demo to do. See some of the missions that we were like the one we slammed at the south pole of moon looking for water. They came around for it even though it was landing in the middle of the night, 2 or 3am and they came. Yeah. So they're very interested in that stuff. So they follow.

This is where sometimes serendipity and good luck plays a hand. Yeah, so, so you start planet and and Steve invests. And when do you start sniffing around the fact that Google had satellites?

Well, they bought a Terra Bella or Sky Skybox Imaging, which became Terra Bella I want to say in 2015. And so they bought that to start a satellite arm and they actually were sniffing around us too at the time and we wanted to stay separate and they bore this arm and well, we thought it was fine and they were going to do that. Of course it's a little bit competitive.

The Skybox at that time was. Was the sub 1 meter resolution image. These are a larger, much more expensive satellite ones.

I was saying at the zoom in because then subsequently Google decided not to continue that investment and spin that out. They came and approached us and Eric, who is then an investor had, had suggested that we have a discussion on that. And we did. And then one thing led to another and we ended up buying their satellite arm. Not for cash. Google has plenty of cash and we had very little. So it made more sense for us to give stock in exchange for those assets. And then Google came a shareholder.

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All right, let's go back to the episode. Do you still call the smaller satellites doves?

Yes, I love that.

And describe those small satellites.

Yeah, they're about this big. They weigh about 5 or 7 kilograms, so, you know, 10 or 15 pounds. They, they spread their wings out to close solar panels. The solar panels, exactly. Yeah. And they chirp a little bit from there. Actually, we get data rates of 2 gigabits a second over a thousand kilometer range from our little radios.

Now that's amazing. What, what altitude are you flying at? I mean, people need to know, the lower the altitude, the better the resolution, the better com rate. But the degradation you degrade in orbit.

Yeah, that's right.

Because what's your trade there?

Yeah. Well, our trade is we choose about three year life. Our thinking is that just like you don't want a three year old phone in your pocket, you don't want a three year old satellite in space. It starts to become obsolete. And just the same actually, really every. We've launched on average four times. We've launched 35 rockets, over 500 satellites. We launch on average four times a year. And every time we're iterating the technology to make it better and better. Just like every time you buy a new phone, it's got the bigger camera, a better, better hard drive. Whatever, we're doing the same. And we call that strapping space to Moore's Law to make it better and better in that, that place of data per dollar, you know, which is the sort of the vector we're trying, the metric we're trying to optimize. So we've seen a 10,000 fold increase from our first satellite to our satellite today in terms of data per dollar.

And that's, that's incredible. I mean that is, that is Amore's Law. And are you mostly launching on SpaceX these days or.

SpaceX? We've launched on 35 times on 10 different Rocke vehicles. But indeed SpaceX and the PSLV. I think SpaceX has been our most common one of all.

PSLV is India.

Right. And we've launched on other vehicles as well, the European Vega, the US Atlas, others.

And when you, I mean, when starship starts, I mean, you could launch all 200 at once.

No, we could launch like 10,000 at once. It's going to be crazy. Yeah, yeah, no, it's crazy. I mean, you know, I do worry about the A380 problem with that. Like it's not clear that there's yet a market for that vehicle. It's not impedance matched with people's ability to build satellites yet. The only satellite fleet that can fill it up at the minute is really Starlink itself. But then that doesn't help, you know, they're only their own customer, you know.

Do you feel, I mean, Planet used to have the biggest, baddest, most satellites.

On orbit, the largest satellite fleet. But Elon came over and did more. Yeah, I know, it's kind of annoying. They're bigger satellites and he's got more of them. I'm pretty outraged by this. No, it's good. Look, we're all obviously trying to do things to help the planet and I commend what they have done with Starling. It's. And the rockets, of course, the reusability, I was a doubter on that. I thought the reusability was too hard. And he did it.

I mean, you and I have both been for the last 25 years space cadets. And it was always the holy grail of reusability. I mean, it was.

He pulled it off. Yeah. And he pulled it off. Yeah. Incredible. You always think of this as Elon, of course, it's a huge team and. But Elon of course has been an inspiring leader for them to do that.

You know, this past three years we got Elon to fund $100 million gigaton carbon removal X prize to try and stem the tide of the environmental destruction. And you have become an extraordinarily outspoken individual on the environment. And I think part of what you're trying to do with planet is give us the tools to measure the planet in a way that allows us to hold companies, individuals, dictators, nation states responsible for the impact they're having. Because despite the borders that exist, they don't prohibit the, the free movement of pollutants and CO2. So talk a little bit about that. So if people listening are not convinced or need some persuasion on the state of affairs, give us your best shot.

No, I mean, look from our 10,000 foot view, or in our case 400 kilometer view, we see the whole planet and I see it evolving. The facts are stark and humans have obviously manipulated the planet. We've got two big problems. The one that everyone knows about and the one that everyone doesn't. The one that everyone knows about is climate and how we are emitting too much CO2 and it's warming the planet and obviously we're having extreme weather events. Now that is exactly what the scientists have said. It's the first thing you get is that, and, and of course sea level rising, whole nation states being wiped out. The second is biodiversity loss. And this is where we're wiping out ecosystems of life. And you might think, well, why does that matter to humans? I mean, they're just up there, some, whatever, some animals in the jungle. Why does it matter for us? It matters for us because it is estimated that half our economy depends upon what they call nature services, which is the trees and the soils and the mycelium and the plants clean our water and they clean our air and they do all these things and we don't have the industrial capability to replace that. We don't have the technology we are fully, fully dependent on, on the rest of life. And in the last 40 years, in my lifetime, we've wiped out 70% of the life on the Earth. 82% of wild mammals gone in 40 years, 75% of fish in freshwater rivers and lakes gone in the last 40 years. 70% of insects gone in the last 40 years. 66% of birds, over half the coral reefs, over half the forest, all gone. And we think irretrievably gone. And we think we can do that without there being consequences for us. We are so naive. And what is driving that is deforestation, overfishing, it's human pollutions from agriculture into rivers. It's all these sort of things. And that is just a Big problem as climate change. And they couple of course to make things worse now the Amazon is not any longer a net CO2 sucker because of the climatic events and then that means it's more likely to fall over. As an ecosystem. We are dealing with a complicated system. Humans need to a forest reforest a lot of the land. We need to stop our overfishing, we need to do these things. And there's things humans, individuals can do for this, right? We've got to, you know, reduce our intake of meat, which is what drives 70% of deforestation is, is for. For cows. We've got to reduce of course use of fossil fuels and those things. And we've got to. There's things we could do to help as well, like helping in our local parks to plant trees to help rewild local parks. I'm involved with a project that is just rewilding an area about a thousand hectares north of here in San Francisco to try and bring back the native ecosystems after over usage but mining and over cattle usage of an area that wiped out most of the natives. It's hard work and I wanted to understand what it takes on the ground because we're trying to help people through satellite imagery all over the world to do this conservation efforts. But yeah, no, the situation is somewhat tragic. What I would say is we have wicked problems and we have wicked tools to go help them. And our aim at planet is to help provide everyone those tools. Let me give you an example. We are trying to switch to a sustainable economy. For that we basically have to measure nature and carbon and put it into our economic system. At the end of every year, every company and every country on the planet is going to need to balance its carbon books just like you balance your finances. And just like doing that, of course the first step is measuring where all the carbon is. Whereas all in your supply chain you can all do a personal carbon budget. You'll find that flying around is probably the worst bit, as I did. But you need to balance that budget. Well, how do you offset your carbon of your flights or whatever? Well, you can grow trees, you can change transition farms to sustainable farming practices. Well, how do you know that's happening when you do that? Well, you need satellite data that can do that. We just launched just a few weeks ago. It's one of my proudest launches for Planet Moments. Proudest moments is not a rocket launch but a launch of a data product called Forest Carbon Planetary variable. We are measuring the carbon across the whole forest of the earth and helping to quantify how much carbon is in the trees and we're actually doing it at 3 by 3 meter level every quarter and then going back 10 years and that means pretty much each tree we'll be able to say how much carbon is in the tree. Why does that matter? Well it matters because if we're going to have carbon markets where Microsoft say says I I want to offset my carbon of all my execs flying around and some people in the Amazon say well we'll plant some trees or stop deforestation in my area. Somebody needs to act as the bridge that says indeed they have done that and how much carbon has increased. Right. You need a carbon economy and we've been lacking that. But it all depends on this core measurement.

So you make possible actually an X prize I've wanted to do for a while. I've wanted to do for lack of a better term, the trillion trees X prize which is any team can register and can claim a plot of land where they're going to plant trees. They've got to have permission from the land owner. Could be a government location, so forth. And we measure, and hopefully there are thousands of teams in 100, 100 plus countries around the world and we measure who wins. Now one wins by getting the most but there's this massive long tail over the course of a decade.

You know I'm a big fan of your, your prizes because I think they incentivize innovation as well as much more capital in than the prize givers gear. It's kind of amazing what happens. Yeah, I, I think you could even do it by carbon. Of course you have to restrict it by. And there was a mistake a little bit in New Zealand where they, they tried to do this based on carbon and then everyone planted pine trees which turned out to be fastest at adding carbon. But they were not native, they hurt a lot of the other species and then when the wind blew they all fell down. And so you have to do the right kind of trees. But yes, subject to certain caveats, you want to incentivize people to do that also to restore existing forests. People have taken a few trees out or so. Yeah, we. And the idea is to be able to measure that to underpin carbon markets or carbon prizes of the kind you had just sang.

Love it. Will we have a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs, people who've got big ideas, what I dare call exponential entrepreneurs. Could you mind sharing some of your lessons learned like in some of the challenges or problems or like, you know, what was it that led you to this Extraordinary success of building this, you know, and now as a public company, CEO and a company frankly, that has 100x growth potential as you measure the world, it's huge. It's a data company, it's an AI company that uses satellite technology. But the journey could not have been easy. What were some of the lessons learned? What's the advice you have for entrepreneurs out there?

Well, look, I think the biggest thing is that it takes time, grit and endurance. They, you know, a lot of people list all the things that differentiate good startups and bad startup with the right idea, the right timing, all these things. I'd say by far the biggest one is endurance, as you put it to me once. And it's one of the sagest pieces of advice I ever received. And it was to do with your project and the first X Prize, the Ansari X Prize. You said for eight years no one noticed what you were doing. Basically no one even figured it out. Maybe. I remember you showing me a little clip from the LA Times that was like this big on page 40, how proud you were that somebody had. It was something like that and I was like, wow, Peter's great. And then two years later it was front page of every headline on the planet. Yeah, it, the exponentials are hard to understand and they, you know, humans don't have good intuition for it, as you've explained many times. And so towards the end you get a big effect that so you could do, you know, and as the, as the Silicon Valley adage goes, you always underestimate what you can do in a year. So overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do. 10. It takes 10. No, but the safe piece of advice I should say is the thing you said it takes, because of that experience, it takes 10 years to do anything meaningful in the world. 10 years?

Yeah. You had 11 year from coming up with the idea until the company went public. X Prize was 11 years for me too.

It's 10, 12 years. If you're tackling a problem that's actually going to have serious impact on the world, not just a frivolous thing. And, and, and it's not going to happen in a year, it's going to happen in 10. So, wow, you know, that's just a reality, I think, and there's huge rewards for it, but you have to stick with it. And the number of people that told me no, you know, I could, I can't even count, right? I mean, no, you can't do it. No, you can't have money. No. There's no business. No. There's. You can't build this. I like ba da ba ba da ba da. So you know, to keep going, you know, and our team had to weather through that. Right. And that's. It takes a certain sense of endurance as well as. As idea and timing and all the rest of it which obviously you need two but. And luck. Whole heap of luck. Right. I mean, you know, I mentioned the Sergey and Larry thing. I mean what the heck. Right place at the right time like so some of that just one would.

Say luck comes from perseverance as well. Like you stick around long enough.

Totally, totally. And to take risks. Right. So yeah. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that. So I definitely would say you've got to stick with it. The other thing I would say is tackle something that's meaningful in the world. Life's too short. Don't ever start the strategy that looks like this. I will do this thing which doesn't sound that interesting. Cool tech. But really the main thing is I'll get rich and then I'll be a philanthropist to give the money away. Such bullshit. Agree.

It's ridiculous.

Is that vote with your feet. Do something useful every day. Don't wait a few years until you're rich enough to then do cool stuff. Do cool stuff with your feet. You know there's, you know, I gave a talk a Stanford is this. So I have a basic test for that. If you should be able to whatever your idea is, you should be able to look at the UN development goals, sustainable development goals and check a few. That that goal, that project helps. And if you can't, if the answer is a null set, you should be looking seriously that idea. You know and let me be honest, like there's a lot of apps in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Maybe a billion companies.

No more photo, no more photo sharing apps, please.

Yeah, exactly. What the heck that may make money. And it is perfectly waste of time. And I used to think of this as like okay, well that's cool. Different people do different things and that's helpful. Except when you think about all the challenges of the planet, we can't waste loads of the best engineers. This is what gives me pain about a Facebook right now. And I don't mean to pick them up but like I don't see it's not clear. It's net positive to the world. And again you could say, well it doesn't matter. Cool stuff, cool tech. I'm sure some interesting tech will come out of it. There's Definitely good, but there's definitely bad in terms of ruining information ecology with echo chambers and stuff. But I think it's much worse than that. You are putting 40,000 or whatever it is, engineers who aren't solving the world's problems. They're just helping us to share pictures. What the fuck? I mean, there's people starving on the planet. I'm sorry, you know, just not where we need to be putting our time and resources when we have, you know, a half a billion people that are undernourished, a climate change challenge, a biodiversity loss, all the problems that we have in the world. So life's too sure. If it doesn't hit one of the big goals for the planet, don't do it.

Yeah. The way I put it is if you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people and the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a Grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter, we'll put you to the top of the the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners.

All right, let's go back to our episode. You know, I'll close out with something else. We just landed on the moon, which is fun. First commercial, private commercial vehicle to, to make it. And you and I have been lunites, uh, for quite some time. You were involved with Pete Warden on a few, shall we say, uh, undercover, unusual lunar missions, Area 51 lunar missions. Yeah, yeah. Uh, to crash into the south pole and image the lunar poles. Looking for ice in permanently shadowed areas because ice is the Saudi oil fields of the moon, liquid oxygen and hydrogen. I just announced on a podcast, I went back with Bill Gross from Idealab and we talked about the blastoff lunar mission we had worked on for, for a number of years. And of course, Google Lunar X Prize that you were familiar of. We had 26 teams, three made attempts, and Intuitive was the fourth team that made an attempt and they pulled it off.

They stuck. The landing was the hard.

Yeah, amazing. Makes you, makes you proud. Now, it wasn't quite, you know, the Lunar Rover in 1972 bouncing around with humans, but, but just like your phone sat has evolved, the evolution of what we'll see, especially as starship gets to the moon, is going to be awesome. Are you still a lunite over a Mars guy?

Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. It's not only. It's like a thousand times easier to put a settlement on the moon than Mars. Look, I mean, I think we've mainly got to pay attention to this planet, but I mean, the moon is inspiring to me. I think that it's a place where I would love to visit there and look back at how big the Earth is in the sky four times wider than the moon is in our sky and see the continents and get that perspective that I think that helps people to understand our place. But Practically and technically it is just far easier than Mars because Mars has the annoying thing of an atmosphere, which for. For space faring species is really annoying. Right. It's only useful if you can actually breathe it, which you can't on Mars. If you can't breathe it, then it just makes landing and taking off much harder. You still have to wear a spacesuit, but you can't land and take off. And the moon is one and a half or two days or three days travel time, whereas ours is eight months and you can go any day of the week, which makes a big difference.

2.4 Second round trip by the speed of light. You can have a conversation.

Exactly. You can have a conversation, whereas you can't. I mean just the difficulty delta is orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude, I think. You know, we did this estimate, this workshop when we were at Ames where we estimated even with star, with, with Falcon 9. Forget starship we. And by the way, Falcon 9 is perfectly adequate for this. You could put a settlement on the moon with that. We think would be self sustaining. Being able to do its course poor things of being able to mend everything that would break. That would be life system critical for a couple of billion dollars. What the heck, that seems like a reasonable. Why wouldn't we do that?

I mean it's something an individual can do, right? Elon or Bezos.

Yeah, some of our friends could do that and they wouldn't even notice it disappeared from their bank account. Yeah, yeah. I mean look again, most of our energy has got to be on, on terra firma. We've got so many challenges, but it's inspiring and I think it makes sense at that sort of scale to have a, have backup plans for humanity. So.

Yeah.

Yep, yep. The SIM chat, exactly. Yeah. If I could just riff off that at least. Yeah, it's a tool, but it's an ecosystem for sure. There's no way we can do all the applications as one company that have held to help use this data to help make smarter decisions or help make lives better around the planet. There's just a billion companies that could be built off the top of this that you know, we an application. So yeah, AI makes it easier as well. So you don't have to have again a PhD in satellite imagery processing to get to grips with this. This is a standard API. You say your aoi, your area of interest, your time of interest, your toi, and then we'll just give you the data or even we'll give you analytic speeds like how much carbon is in all the trees or, or where all the ships or whatever and we'll just give you let longs and these things. This is getting easier and easier. And so I think we're successful only not only we can enable that. We're only successful as Planet if we help companies to do that as an ecosystem. This is like the iPhone app store but for building solutions to help the planet.

I was going to say that, yeah.

I want thousands of ecopreneurs, as Mark Benioff likes to say, of entrepreneurs that are focused on helping the planet building off of the top of planet's data. You know, I mean, let me say one other thing. Look, we do have real, as I said, we've got wicked problems, wicked technologies to help solve them. I'm going to disagree with your abundance thing a little bit here. We have. Some of those problems are so acute that I think that we're going to need technology solutions like renewable energy and better data solutions. And we're going to have to consume less material resources because you can get more digital resources, but you can't consume more than we're currently consuming. It's eating the planet. That's what we're seeing, the mining. Even if you swap the renewable energy, for example, we're seeing all the mining for lithium, for more batteries. In the end we also just need to eat a little less, waste less. You know, we waste 45% of our food. We need to conserve a little bit more on electricity and things. That combination is what we're going to need to get out of here. It's a matter of smart use of our present stuff, smart technologies like renewable energy and smart use of our present stuff, including a personal behavioral level. We're going to have to change our behavior a little bit.

I respect the reduction in waste and I respect the increase in efficiency. And I think for the first time ever, we've got the tools to begin to think that through, that and to do that. So listen, if you're a moonshot entrepreneur and you're trying to figure out your next gig, what would you do with an incredible information layer on top of the Earth that is getting deeper and richer and accessible through APIs and AI engines, I can start imagining a whole slew of different startups I'd be doing. So maybe it's a little bit of inspiration. Again, thank you to you, Will, to Robby, to Chris for founding Planet. A real pleasure to have you as a friend and so proud of what you built.

Thanks a lot, Peter. It's been a pleasure to have this conversation with you today, Ra.