Notes and Transcript on Will Marshall <> Ashlee Vance
Notes
- Major things this decade
- AGI
- Finding life off Earth
- Drake equation - We know that there’s gazillions that have the potential to host life if life got there, but we don’t know how many on which life independently arose, and we don’t know that probability
- Decoding animal communications
- New ways to think
- telescopes have now got to the stage on the Earth-bound telescopes as well as the JWST are big enough to do atmospheric spectra on planets
- AI helps pattern match everything that’s going on
- global sensing revolution
- early days still - less than 1% into a big future and AI is accelerating that
- sensing side - Planet now images the entire land mass of the Earth once per day at about 10, 30, 11 a.m. local time (180 doves/super doves)
- if you want to get a quick understanding of something, take a picture. If you want to scientifically measure it, take a spectra.
- spectra = fingerprint of objects on the earth
- real-time accounting system of what’s happening on Earth (a common picture of what’s happening)
- Data companies = winner-take-most sort of situation (e.g. Bloomberg)
- Mainstream LLMs are now multimodal - beyond text/language (audio, visual imagery, video)
- you can automatically search for things without having to have trained any model
- estimate land use change over time, plot some pie graphs of the changes
- count new roads or buildings
- AI companies are going to have to proactively steer that technology. Otherwise, their default path will be to accelerate our blowing up of the planetary boundaries
- space debris
- relatively simple things can ensure that we don’t cause a problem, like keeping the satellites lower. where the atmosphere of the Earth just self-cleans those orbits
- The bigger problem is not satellites, but the debris, which are the leftover bits of satellites when satellites blow up and things.
- (1) ban anti-satellite technology - 10,000 pieces of of debris that you can’t even track because it’s so small and that could be catastrophic to collide with other satellites
- (2) mega constellations need to stay low
- (3) traffic management system and debris removal services
- laser scheme for nudging space debris
- the known pieces of debris if two are going to collide you nudge one using light pressure so the light just nudges it so that it misses the other piece and then it stops the cascade with one laser system in one telescope in the uh pole you need in antarctica or the arctic
- NASA doesn’t know what to do with projects that are under a billion dollars. So this was only going to cost 10 or 20 million
- Australians that have been testing a laser through a telescope system there to nudge debris
- satellite build $$$ –> $?
- 300 million per spacecraft to do that in the Earth systems budget
- After R&D, we can pump out that spacecraft for about six or seven million, including launch
- sending cell phones up in the space - Consumer electronics would work in space and we’d be able to do spacecraft this 1,000x-ish cheaper
- which we still haven’t seen the full implications of
- Inspiring things
- Rainbow Mansion
- Cosmic Duty vs Cosmic Tragedy (we have wiped out 70% of life by numbers, by population decline. It’s 80% for wild mammals. So there’s 80% less deer and moose, and there’s 70% less fish in freshwater rivers and lakes. There’s 75% less insects than there were 40 years ago. There’s half the corals have gone, half the forests have gone.)
- Jevons paradox - the default way in which AI is going to have an impact in our capitalist-driven society is definitely going to be accelerating the exploitation of the planet
- Copernican events - nudging us out from being the center of the universe on everything
- Planet
- eight spectral bands at three meter resolution, all in optical and near infrared
- Terra Bella acquisition from Google - 50 centimeter resolution
- hyperspectral satellite - 420 color bands, just like our eye has three colors. It’s 420 colors spanning a wide spectrum. So it’s starting at 400 nanometers out to 2.5 microns
- PPP w/ NASA JPL and a consortium of players to develop the most sensitive hyperspectral instrument in the galaxy
- We estimate the market to be 50 to 100 billion a year just for our earth imaging data and analytics sitting on top of it
- convolutional neural nets - bespoke trainer model
- boomerangers - They go to SpaceX, they go to Google, and then they realize that it’s better at Planet.
- dirty infrastructure off earth less pressure on our ecosystems (Gerard K. O’Neill)
- EO Tracking
- the type of species of tree or coral reef or grass or what have you on the ground
- The shade of paint so well for defense and intelligence applications that they can say, this tank… was made at that factory because their shade of green or whatever it is camouflage is slightly different from the other factory
- detect gas emissions so um turns out methane gas for example absorbs a particular uh set of uh uh of light in a very narrow uh um spectra
And so by looking for that and the ratio between that and other spectral bands nearby, we can actually tell the volume of methane in the column between the satellite and the ground
- measure the amount of methane gas leaking from a facility like a gas leak or cows farting or from a landfill site or whatever
- watch construction projects taking place
- crops are healthy
- precision agriculture - automatically extract out your field boundaries of your different fields, automatically say which crop type, is it corn or soy, and automatically figure out which area of the farmer’s field your field is doing less well, needs water, needs fertilizer, needs help in some way
- count objects - building detection, road detection, airplane detection, ship detection
- Scale
- detect where the deforestation is in 8 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon
- value prop: halved the deforestation rate - they reduced deforestation rates by more than half, 3,000 interventions last year, confiscating $3 billion worth of assets
- battle damage assessment near Ukarine - monitoring 18 million square kilometers every day
- value prop: half of them were being shot down and not coming back. So instead, now they just look in our imagery and if there’s no changes they don’t need to send that drone saving them billions of dollars
- detect where the deforestation is in 8 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon
- Metrics
- price performance of satellites
- cost reduction: 1,000x over 4x for the rocket
- launch cost per kilogram
- price performance of satellites
- TODOs (look into)
- convolutional neural nets - bespoke trainer model
- Australians that have been testing a laser through a telescope system there to nudge debris
Transcript: EP 43 Will Marshall <> Ashlee Vance on Core Memory
Source: URL
| Time | Speaker | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Will Marshall | In the next decade, we’ll see three really major things with incredible significance for humanity. Next decade. In the next decade. One is AGI. And then second is finding life off Earth Not necessarily intelligent life, but life off Earth. We will discover it. And the third is decoding animal communications, so between chimps, between dolphins, between different animals. |
| 0:30 | Will Marshall | And I think all three are incredible events. And the fact that they may all happen in one decade is, and I call them Copernican events because they’re nudging us out from being the center of the universe on everything. So obviously AGI is inventing another intelligence alongside us, finding life off Earth, even if it’s not intelligent, |
| 0:49 | Will Marshall | will give us a bigger probability that there’s life everywhere. And it will have got to intelligence stages. |
| 0:55 | Ashlee Vance | And why do you think we find? Oh, |
| 0:56 | Will Marshall | because telescopes have now got to the stage on the Earth-bound telescopes as well as the JWST are big enough to do atmospheric spectra on planets. So we’ve discovered thousands of planets, mainly by the wobbles of the stars. We look at the wobbles of the stars and go, oh, |
| 1:14 | Will Marshall | there must be a planet orbiting around that’s tugging on it. Sometimes from them going in front of the star and dipping the light a tiny bit. But we don’t know much about those planets. We know the basic size and orbit. But we don’t know what their composition is. |
| 1:30 | Will Marshall | Now we have telescopes that are just big enough to look at the composition of these. And what we will see, if you looked at the Earth from the other side of the galaxy with one of these telescopes, or at least more like most of these planets, the star systems that we’ve detected planets within thousands of light years, |
| 1:47 | Will Marshall | so the nearby region of our galaxy, you would quickly see that there’s about 20% oxygen in our atmosphere. Now, that is highly unusual. because oxygen binds with almost anything. That’s why we get rust and all the rest of it. The only thing that’s keeping up that oxygen here on the earth is all the life, all the plants. |
| 2:16 | Will Marshall | And so we could look for that signature or other similar signatures where the best explanation we would have is life is producing it. Or more rigorously, if we can eliminate that there’s other chemical ways or geological ways, non-life ways of producing those things. |
| 2:33 | Ashlee Vance | So you think… We’ve just had enough advances with the… |
| 2:38 | Will Marshall | The size of the telescopes to be able to block out the sun and just focus on the planet and resolve that and do spectra on it. We’ve just got to telescopes that are big enough to take spectra of nearby planets. We’ve got all the targets lined up. We’ve got thousands of planets. We know where they are. |
| 2:52 | Will Marshall | We now need to look at them with these next generation of telescopes. And I think the chances of us… I think we’ll get to the point of having a signature that we say the best explanation by far is life within the next 10 years. It won’t be certain. We won’t have visited it. |
| 3:08 | Will Marshall | We wouldn’t have had a little green man wave in the telescope. |
| 3:13 | Ashlee Vance | If we can talk to animals, I feel like it’s going to go really bad for us. Fascinating, of course. would 100%, but those first discussions, I don’t think humans fare very well in what the animals have to say back. |
| 3:32 | Will Marshall | They might be pretty pissed off, yeah, since we just wiped out most of them. But I think it would be fascinating, right? Like, what are they really talking about? What are they… And there’s incredible… I mean, whales have been talking, if they’ve been talking, they’ve been talking for 70 million years. Wow. They know stuff. They know stuff. |
| 3:52 | Will Marshall | Like… Can you tell us anything about that? Just imagine the culture that we could learn about. |
| 3:57 | Ashelee Vance | You think we’re going to know what they say to each other. To each other. |
| 4:00 | Will Marshall | But we won’t be. Well, no, then we can talk to them for sure. I mean, like it’s an amazing precipice that we could. And then, of course, I hope that it will expand our empathy circles to include them in the things we value. Right now, we don’t really value life. People. |
| 4:18 | Ashlee Vance | It’s going to be a lot harder to eat them when they’re… I hope so. |
| 4:23 | Will Marshall | I really hope that’s one of the consequences. |
| 4:26 | Ashlee Vance | And you think that happens because AI helps pattern match everything that’s going on? |
| 4:32 | Will Marshall | Yeah, exactly. You’re going to feed it all of this acoustic data and maybe even body language data or what have you for chimps. And it will start deciphering. And it may not be that sophisticated. It may be that the dog just says, hey, I’m hungry or… I’m pleased to see you again. |
| 4:48 | Will Marshall | But I think we will discover some subtleties about their social behavior, and we’ll certainly empathize more with their plight, even if it’s a very simple… It might be like listening to… toddlers that just start understanding language right so it’s very simple but it’s interesting to understand their worldviews and what they see is interesting what |
| 5:12 | Will Marshall | they question and uh yeah i think those three moments are all decentering humans from the middle just like copernicus uh descended oh i see and then uh but if and |
| 5:24 | Ashlee Vance | if we saw life that far away it’s not like we would be able to Like it would be amazing to know, but we’re not getting there anytime soon to have some sort of context. |
| 5:36 | Will Marshall | Going from one to more than one, the genesis of life in the universe will mean we would know a lot more about the statistical probability of life and how much it’s arisen, right? And we’ve got thousands of planets. If a handful of them have life, we would then know that the universe is teeming with life. |
| 5:58 | Will Marshall | On the other hand, if we don’t find any, or none with even strong suspects, because it will never be black and white, it will be an evolution, as I said, that we’ll probably find out. This planet has got this chemical signature, and the best thing, we can’t think of a volcanic reason that we would have that. |
| 6:15 | Will Marshall | The only obvious answer is some sort of life. We don’t know for sure, but that’s the best explanation we have. We’ll get to that point in this decade. And knowing that, That is cosmologically significant because, again, we’ve only had one example so far. And if we discovered it on Mars or nearby planets, |
| 6:37 | Will Marshall | then there’s still the question of whether it was panspermia, whether there was one genesis of life and it spawned onto the other one because there’s a lot of material moving between our planets in the solar system. But if we discovered it on another solar system, the chances of that are really diminished. |
| 6:52 | Will Marshall | So it’s almost certainly an independent genesis of life, which will, again, mean probably, since we’ve only sampled a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but roughly, I remember thinking there’s about A million, million, million or 10,000 million, million, million Earth-like planets if you just rounded it down to things that are about the |
| 7:17 | Will Marshall | size of the Earth with the chemical composition of the Earth in the universe. So we’ve got just God knows how many planets of all different shapes and sizes, but we just don’t know the fraction of them that have life. We know that there’s gazillions that have the potential to host life if life got there, |
| 7:34 | Will Marshall | but we don’t know how many on which life independently arose, and we don’t know that probability. The main missing question in the Drake equation of how much life is in the universe is the zero to one bit on if the conditions are right. So we know there’s lots of places where the condition is right, |
| 7:53 | Will Marshall | but we don’t know how often it’s arisen. |
| 7:55 | Ashlee Vance | I mean, if all three of those things happen in a decade, yeah, I don’t even know what to begin to tell my children to, like, think about, to study, to navigate. You know, I just feel like we’re heading to such an upside-down, fast-moving… |
| 8:12 | Will Marshall | Yeah, I mean, my gran said it was amazing because she saw from horse cart to man on the moon. But this is much more dramatic change in terms of the intelligence explosion and uncovering and in terms of the position and place in the cosmos more profound than any of those things. |
| 8:37 | Ashlee Vance | Well, given the breadth of things I cover, there’s a non-zero chance I could break at least one of those stories, I think. |
| 8:42 | Will Marshall | Yeah, for sure. Yeah, giant. Go for it. Yeah. I think it’s just, that is tantalizing to me, what’s happening in the next 10 years in those months. |
| 8:51 | Ashlee Vance | Like that excites you. It doesn’t scare the living shit out of you. |
| 8:55 | Will Marshall | I think it’s both. But mainly it’s excitement, especially on the aliens. I mean, I can’t wait to move to the aliens. But I mean, as I said, it’s most likely non-intelligent. But still, knowing that there’s life off Earth will be such a huge thing about life being teeming in the universe. |
| 9:29 | Ashlee Vance | Will Marshall. What a treat. It’s great to be here. Unlike most of my guests, I have written a book about you, made a movie about you. |
| 9:40 | Will Marshall | Yeah, what else do you need to know? I don’t know why I’m here. |
| 9:43 | Ashlee Vance | Well, this is so other people can get to know you. I usually am plugging someone else’s book. I get the rare… treat to plug my own there we go when the heavens went on sale yeah do you do i’m just kidding no do you have one okay i should make that happen um okay so trying to |
| 10:00 | Ashlee Vance | embarrass you to to to give people who have might not have read when the heavens went on sale or seen wild wild space shame on them on hbo um i’ll give some context will marshall a man who’s hard to describe in some ways, a physicist, a quite accomplished physicist, obviously the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. |
| 10:23 | Ashlee Vance | For people who do not know what that company does, they really pioneered a new way to image the Earth from space using hundreds of satellites that take photos of planets every spot on the earth’s landmass many times a day it’s been a revolutionary technology not just in terms of getting new imagery about earth but also in how |
| 10:47 | Ashlee Vance | satellites were manufactured turning that into a mass production um feat which now we see spacex other companies doing all over the place and so and worked at nasa did a bunch of cool missions one of which not only like helped confirm that we had |
| 11:06 | Ashlee Vance | water at the poles of the moon but but found more water a lot of water yeah a lot |
| 11:12 | Will Marshall | of water five or six percent by mass water on the south parliament yeah but also like hydrocarbons so there was um methane detected co2 some nitrates some really interesting stuff in volatile form that could be useful for a base there one day |
| 11:27 | Ashlee Vance | It was a really cool mission. You were a part of a, which we document in the book and the movie, this revolutionary group of youngsters at NASA turned NASA Ames into quite an exciting place. Yeah, |
| 11:40 | Will Marshall | under the stewardship of Pete Warden, who deserves all the credit that you give him in that book. |
| 11:47 | Ashlee Vance | He’s a great, great man. And then also… One last bit and then I’ll shut up. The thing that I’ve been interested in for a long time, lived in communal houses, kind of a communal house pioneer in Silicon Valley, which we will get into. So yeah, those were the big bits. Are you offended if I left anything out? |
| 12:09 | Will Marshall | Not at all, not at all. |
| 12:12 | Ashlee Vance | There’s tons of directions I want to go. First off, just as far as the book and the movie go, I always try to give people a chance to settle, you know, since I get the pen and I get to make the movie, anything you would like to publicly, you know, flog me about. |
| 12:33 | Will Marshall | I thought it was an incredibly, um, it was delightful that you, you chose this topic, uh, to dive in a little bit more. A lot of people don’t know about this revolution that’s happening in space. Um, I thought the way you did it was a relatively good character portrayal of all the crazy kids there, you know, |
| 12:54 | Will Marshall | like Chris camp, it’s not necessarily an exaggeration what you say, you know, and, um, um, and. Peter Beck and, you know, I think you get the, you know, I’ve, I’ve challenged you before on the title, which I thought didn’t really, and your editors pushed you or that. And, uh, um, but it’s not about the commercialization. |
| 13:18 | Will Marshall | That’s not the focus. The focus is. It’s so much more deeper missionary and it really is about how do we help life on earth? How do we explore the stars? It’s so much bigger to put it down into monetary terms is to belittle the ambition, in a way, of the crew and the cast of characters. |
| 13:42 | Will Marshall | I know you had editor pressure. But I want to tell you one fun anecdote that after the Wild Wild Space, I was at a very high level conference, the Munich Security Conference. A lot of heads of state and generals and it’s the big security forum of the year. |
| 14:02 | Will Marshall | And a general literally chased me down because he recognized me as I passed him by in the corridor. And it was basically the deputy supreme allied commander of NATO. And he had seen the Wild Wild Space documentary. He got so excited that he wanted to have a meeting and talk about how our data |
| 14:24 | Will Marshall | could be very helpful to monitor Russia and other things that he was trying to do and to demonstrate how NATO could move faster on new tech. And so we ended up forging a partnership that actually got announced earlier this summer. It was a great… Great partnership that we’re still in the early phases of, |
| 14:42 | Will Marshall | but monitoring large areas with AI and our data set. But it came directly, I cannot explain any other thing that instigated that partnership. |
| 14:52 | Ashlee Vance | I’m sure he would have found you. He would have found you anyway. All right, what do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex, because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies, 30,000 companies from startups to the world’s largest corporations. |
| 15:18 | Ashlee Vance | rely on Brex’s technology for their finances. They’ve got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses. And Brex’s AIs and software run right through those expenses, figure out where we’re spending money, |
| 15:38 | Ashlee Vance | and take care of so much stuff for you so you don’t have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com slash core memory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let’s get going. Let’s get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. Core memory and Brex. |
| 15:57 | Ashlee Vance | The books, it seems to have like found an audience among the military. The Space Force made it like book of the year or something. They wanted me to come speak in Colorado. And I mean, I guess it makes sense, but in some ways, but yeah, it’s always funny to see what |
| 16:13 | Ashlee Vance | where these things end up have you had other people recognize you on like a united |
| 16:16 | Ashlee Vance | flight or anything like that so many people started saying i saw the film because united put it on their thanks lots of people and yes occasionally yeah i’ve i’ve had a few luckily it’s not too much so but like a few times i’ve been hiking out |
| 16:34 | Will Marshall | and somebody’s like are you that guy from that space documentary i’m like yep Guilty as charged. |
| 16:41 | Ashlee Vance | I know you’re upset about the crass capitalism of the title of the book, and we will get into that, I think, with some other questions. And you were a… What I was curious about is you were a somewhat reluctant participant in the documentary. It took a while to warm you up. |
| 17:00 | Ashlee Vance | I think my sense was always you were a bit unsure of the outcome on that. Do you think that’s fair? I think it’s fair. |
| 17:10 | Will Marshall | I think that my logical brain is always… must do the most important things to get our mission accomplished. And I didn’t put media plans as center to that. So that’s one aspect of it. Secondly, I’m like, I don’t want people prying into my personal life so much. |
| 17:28 | Will Marshall | It’s just not, I’m not trying to, you know, get attention like that. But I thought you guys did an amazing job in the documentary of portraying what was going on. And I was so proud. pleased and proud of the way in which it showed how these entrepreneurs are doing amazing things. |
| 17:49 | Will Marshall | So I think you did a great job. |
| 17:50 | Ashlee Vance | All right, you’re being nicer to me than I expected. OK, you have to tell me if this one story is true or not. True or false. You do live and have lived in a communal house for many, many years. We asked many times to film at the communal house. |
| 18:07 | Ashlee Vance | You told me, I think at one point, that the house had voted no. They didn’t want the camera. Then, however, I was at a party with somebody who lives in your house. And they said, yeah, it’s too bad you guys didn’t film. Really? |
| 18:23 | Will Marshall | I didn’t say it was universal. |
| 18:26 | Ashlee Vance | Well, I said, well, Will, he didn’t want that. And they said, well, Will asked us to have a vote one night. And we all voted yes to film. And now I need to know if that is true. |
| 18:37 | Will Marshall | Honestly, I can’t remember doing any such a vote. But definitely… there were varied opinions, but no, it was more personal decision for me. Let me just own it. Like it’s more personal decision for me. |
| 18:52 | Ashlee Vance | I want to start with the communal house, but just for a second, which is maybe not the most natural place to start, but I think it’s interesting. So you guys, I think it is okay to say that you used to live in the rainbow mansion, which is, was this large mansion in, in Cupertino still exists today. |
| 19:07 | Ashlee Vance | There’s still people living there. I think this is, These kinds of houses, I guess, go back decades in some ways, especially in the Northern California spirit. But I always felt like you guys put a modern twist and flavor. A lot of it had grown up out of the counterculture movement and, I don’t know, |
| 19:29 | Ashlee Vance | some culty kind of things and stuff like that. In this period when you were working at NASA Ames and were with a bunch of these smart, energetic 20-year-olds off doing interesting things, you had a group living in this. I always felt like you took this to the, |
| 19:49 | Ashlee Vance | and anyone who knows me knows I’m not saying this in a derogatory way, like the nerd version of this house. You know what I mean? And it shifted a little bit. And then in the subsequent years, these communal houses of tech people are all over Silicon Valley. I find a lot of times they’re, they’re almost themed. |
| 20:07 | Ashlee Vance | It’s like, this is the effective altruism house. This house is doing hardware, whatever. And, and so for people who have never lived in a communal house, who have no idea what this culture is like, you’ve done this now for what, like 25 years or so? 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what is it like? |
| 20:26 | Ashlee Vance | Why do you do it? Um, It’s an important part of your life. I mean, you guys believe in this deeply. |
| 20:35 | Will Marshall | I like to spin the question around of why wouldn’t you? So it goes a bit further back than the 60s hippies counterculture. Of course, it’s how humans have lived for all of our evolution. And the more… the more obvious question to me is why wouldn’t you live in a community? And in this case, you know, |
| 20:59 | Will Marshall | so I can give you a practical answer, which is, you know, we feed our ideas off each other. You learn what the latest stuff in AI and robotics or nanotechnology or what have you by having a community of people that are And then you see intersections and then you spur each other on and you support each |
| 21:14 | Will Marshall | other in doing those great projects trying to help the world. I think the technology is one thematic focus and another thematic focus for our community houses has been technology and society and the intersection of those things and how do we bring about technology into society in a way that maximizes the benefits, minimizes the harms. |
| 21:32 | Will Marshall | And we thought a lot about those questions. And I would say, so I don’t know how much our community houses have directly led to other community houses in the Bay Area. There certainly feels like there’s a bigger resurgence of them. I’m not sure if that’s because of us, you know, I can’t attribute that. |
| 21:50 | Will Marshall | But what I could say is that the ideas that have come out of these houses have been absolutely widely shared. I mean, I always think that we are talking about the things that start to become popular to talk about some of the challenges of technology, for example. |
| 22:10 | Will Marshall | We’re talking about them five years earlier, at least several years earlier. |
| 22:13 | Ashlee Vance | Because you have these communal dinners, you have these salons. |
| 22:16 | Will Marshall | Philosophy salons where we talk about, okay, what’s going to be the application of this cryptocurrency when combined with… this humanitarian situation over there is combined with it and we talk about those we scenario that and we have interesting thought leaders come through and they they |
| 22:34 | Will Marshall | know when they come to the bay area to stay at our place because they’ve stayed there before and they know that that’s where they’ll get the latest touch on what’s going on in silicon valley and that community has led to ideas that have you know |
| 22:48 | Will Marshall | numerous ted talks on numerous topics have happened a few years later on that topic after we’ve baked it a little bit if you like so really um i i think so so yeah but and that more philosophical question is like why you know why would you not live in a community um i think the the |
| 23:12 | Will Marshall | the recent and local phenomena of living not in a community is a peculiarity that will get reversed when people realize it’s very natural to live with other people, and especially a chosen family. We call it a chosen family because these are people that effectively are brothers |
| 23:30 | Will Marshall | and sisters because you live with them for years and do cool stuff together with them. But to do that… it’s so much more fulfilling than living on your own. If you can get basic things right, and people immediately think, oh, it must be a mess, like student dorms. It doesn’t have to be a mess. |
| 23:28 | Ashlee Vance | It just seems like you would be at odds with someone, and it would be very awkward to get them out of the house. I know you’ve met people. But it still feels like that could go wrong often. |
| 24:03 | Will Marshall | It can not often. we’ve had more than a hundred in our community house and once or twice we’ve had issues where we really actually had to ask somebody to leave yeah and you even as |
| 24:18 | Ashlee Vance | you’ve gotten older you look not to be crass again but you’ve made quite a bit of money i assume from from planet um your tastes your your desires they don’t they haven’t changed over the course of |
| 24:32 | Will Marshall | these 20 close years no i don’t really care about it like that and ironically once i realized i was because i don’t look at my uh those detailed uh finances all the time and one of i suddenly realized that somehow that i was in the smallest room in the house, paying the most. |
| 24:51 | Will Marshall | Because we had set up this egalitarian system of paying, which was dependent on your salary, not your, anyway, your ability to contribute. But I liked having more people, so I had chosen this really small room that no one else wanted. |
| 25:06 | Ashlee Vance | Are you still in that room? No, no. |
| 25:08 | Will Marshall | Things moved on. |
| 25:09 | Ashlee Vance | Does your room look like a luxurious bedroom, or is it closer to a dorm or something like that? |
| 25:17 | Will Marshall | Well, I’ve had various rooms over the years. At one time, didn’t you sleep on a bit of plywood over a bathtub? |
| 25:26 | Will Marshall | Yes. Next question. |
| 25:33 | Will Marshall | yeah no i mean how long did you do that like a year or something it wasn’t that long yes um i was thinking of making a contraption to let me fall into the bath in the morning it was an automatic alarm clock did you have to take the plywood off so |
| 25:47 | Will Marshall | people could use every day so people no no it wasn’t an active bathroom i converted the bathroom but yeah |
| 25:53 | Ashlee Vance | Okay. I mean, I think you do have a point, which is it’s bizarre to me in our neighborhood. Like I know almost, I know one neighbor, but I don’t know anywhere near like all our people. People just don’t talk to each other. |
| 26:05 | Will Marshall | We have lost community. |
| 26:07 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah. |
| 26:07 | Will Marshall | When we threw out churches, which I have some sympathy for in certain senses, the fundamental dogmatic belief systems and so on. We threw out the baby with the bathwater, the baby being the community sense and the time together to think together and you know someone giving a sermon about what’s right and wrong |
| 26:31 | Will Marshall | and turning the other cheek and all this basic stuff and we don’t do that anymore we don’t have a community we don’t rely on each other and we don’t and i think that’s part of the challenge we face in our society we’ve got a lot of divisive |
| 26:43 | Will Marshall | politics and other things because people can’t talk to each other but you trace |
| 26:46 | Ashlee Vance | this back to to religion being less of a |
| 26:50 | Will Marshall | Well, certainly in Europe, which is where I’m from, average attendance in churches just plummeted in the last sort of century. I don’t know exact numbers, but the vast majority of people don’t go to church because they’re not religious. They didn’t subscribe to any particular religion. But that, as a consequence, lost the community. Okay. |
| 27:14 | Ashlee Vance | And why do you think, I know you guys have, you’ve even started some communal houses in other parts of the world, but why is this primarily a Bay Area phenomenon? And if so, why? |
| 27:30 | Will Marshall | Well, again, I like to turn the question on its head. I think it’s a fairly Western and local in time phenomenon that people don’t live in community because in much of the world, Often grandkids and uncles and aunts and cousins are all mixed together in bigger, much bigger family units at least. More like we have throughout history. |
| 27:53 | Will Marshall | And it’s only really in the West in the last 100, 200 years that we have separated out to this. nuclear family unit concept and try to live on our own, which made it much harder to raise kids because it takes a village and all these other challenges that I think that stresses on society. |
| 28:12 | Ashlee Vance | Okay. In the context of Planet Labs, I mean, the Rainbow Mansion played a key role, right? Some of these discussions that you’re talking about took place, this idea of You’ve always been an environmentalist, I think it’s fair to say. And this idea that one of the original ideas was, okay, |
| 28:32 | Ashlee Vance | we’re going to photograph the earth in ways that haven’t been done before to show people, to keep track of what is happening to the planet, to see when things are being deforested, to see how rivers change, to monitor. And that did feel like a direct result of the conversations you guys were having. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. |
| 28:53 | Will Marshall | And many other startups came out of these community houses as well. But yeah, for sure. I can also trace some of our lunar missions that you mentioned earlier to some of the conversations that we had in Rainbow Mansion. But yeah, my personal motivation is strongly related to how we can help track all of nature |
| 29:17 | Will Marshall | to help us to take care of it. If you think cosmically, like if you think with the big picture, Life is either extraordinarily rare or singular. I think it’s much more likely the former than the latter, but we only know of one location for life. |
| 29:36 | Will Marshall | And I did a quick calculation the other day just to give you a sense. Life matter in our galaxy, and it doesn’t seem like there’s… Let me get the calculation right. So we think of gold as pretty rare on the Earth, and it’s about one in a few billion atoms per billionth of the mass of the Earth. |
| 30:06 | Will Marshall | Life in our galaxy, if it is on one in 10 star systems is a billion times rarer than gold is on earth. Life is just, even if it’s at the sort of maximal end of how much life there could be in the universe based on our current observations, or at least in our galaxy. |
| 30:31 | Will Marshall | If there’s not some crazy hidden structures of massive amounts of life in our galaxy, it doesn’t seem like there is. It’s a billion times rarer than gold on the earth. Basically, the vast majority of mass of the universe is gas and dust and rocks and things that are not alive. |
| 30:51 | Will Marshall | The preciousness of this, just from a diversity standpoint, is obscene. So we have this incredible diversity of life. It’s almost our cosmic duty to take care of it. It is cosmologically significant. It’s not just locally significant. It’s cosmologically significant because it’s either so rare that it’s just extraordinary, extraordinary rare stuff in the universe, or it’s |
| 31:19 | Will Marshall | the only one either way the duty of humans is above anything else to help take care of life on the earth the incredible complexity the ecologies that we find are so beautiful we are so lucky and yeah so it’s also a cosmic tragedy that we’re and this is uncomfortable to talk about because |
| 31:42 | Will Marshall | People don’t like talking about non-fun stuff, but we have wiped out 70% of life by numbers, by population decline. It’s 80% for wild mammals. So there’s 80% less deer and moose, and there’s 70% less fish in freshwater rivers and lakes. There’s 75% less insects than there were 40 years ago. |
| 32:05 | Will Marshall | There’s half the corals have gone, half the forests have gone. We’re doing what? on this most unique and rare thing imagine taking your one piece of jewelry and smashing it with a hammer and throwing away half of it i mean come on like it’s and |
| 32:22 | Will Marshall | um so yeah i think it’s our most important priority and we’re not doing a very good job right now and so yeah part of the point of planet is to give ourselves the tools to help us to take care of that |
| 32:35 | Ashlee Vance | Okay, since day one, the Core Memory podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley, investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. And in that context, |
| 32:54 | Ashlee Vance | I run the risk of sending this podcast off in a drastically tangential direction. But a lot of these issues that you brought up, you and I have talked about many times. I haven’t really caught up with you since the whole AI boom, this part of the AI boom took off. I feel like sometimes this question is so… |
| 33:17 | Ashlee Vance | can lead to, everybody has their P-doom and all of a sudden, but I haven’t talked to you since all this stuff happened. I mean, are you, where are you? You were already concerned about where the planet and humanity was going. Are you, has AI made you feel better or worse over the last like two or three years? |
| 33:36 | Will Marshall | Well, it’s a complicated question, but AI, I’m very excited about. And I want to get into some of the things we’re doing. I think it’s… And just as a person, I mean, it’s incredible what is now possible. Almost everything we say, oh, only humans can do this. We can now do it with AI. I mean, amazing. |
| 33:56 | Will Marshall | But just in terms of its interface with climate and the environment… There’s this thing called the Jevons paradox, which basically, everyone knows that AI is eating lots of energy directly, right? It’s driving lots of energy consumption, and that’s gonna massively increase. But I think the bigger impact for the planet is its indirect implications, |
| 34:22 | Will Marshall | that it’s making everything more efficient, whether that’s agriculture, oil and gas, mining, all these big industries. What is making those industries more efficient? Well, that mining operation that wasn’t going to be possible before, that oil and gas exploration that wasn’t going to be possible before because it was just slightly too expensive, |
| 34:40 | Will Marshall | now it’s just slightly possible to do. And now, so in general, when the Jevons paradox is sort of version of elasticity of demand, humans, when they invent new technology, things become more efficient. You could, in principle, use that efficiency to do the same thing with less. I can make this… this can with slightly less aluminum. |
| 35:03 | Will Marshall | So I will use the same number of cans, but with less material. Great. Except in practice, what humans do is then go and use that efficiency to do even more. So then we end up extracting even more aluminum than before because we just have twice as many cans. So AI is that on steroids, right? |
| 35:23 | Will Marshall | It’s making all sectors of the world more efficient. And that means we’re going to speed up the blowing up of the planetary boundaries. Wasting away of biodiversity is being driven by material consumption, agriculture, and these things. So by making them more efficient, we’re going to drive that in faster. So whilst AI can help us in key ways, |
| 35:50 | Will Marshall | climate modeling, helping us solve fusion, helping us make more efficient use of data centers, grids, the more impactful, unfortunately, I think, trend, the default way in which AI is going to have an impact in our capitalist-driven society is definitely going to be accelerating the exploitation of the planet. Unless the AI leaders themselves decide, |
| 36:19 | Will Marshall | or we as a society decide to deploy it preferentially on that climate modeling and fusion and less preferentially on resource extraction industries but i don’t see any signs of that right now unfortunately you know so so meaning unless it’s like one of those technologies all technologies how you use it |
| 36:38 | Will Marshall | but by default it will accelerate us blowing up the planet that is pretty clear to me so obviously we’re trying to help the reverse by merging ai and our data sets to help us take care of the planet But if I zoom out and think about the macro, how is AI going to play with our entire economy, |
| 37:00 | Will Marshall | I think that’s the way it’s going to play out. |
| 37:02 | Ashlee Vance | All right, well, that was bleak. I was curious. I actually thought you were going to go hardcore optimist on that one. |
| 37:12 | Will Marshall | Not on how it interfaces with the planet, no. |
| 37:15 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah, OK. All right, well, let’s get into your technology. And I’m going to do some of the context and then let you take it away. For people who don’t know, we’ve had imaging satellites for decades. Actually, I think the first ones were built over here in Sunnyvale in the 50s and 60s, the Corona Project. |
| 37:38 | Ashlee Vance | They tended to be built by governments. They were giant machines that were expensive and rare. The people taking pictures of the Earth, same thing. They had… Small group that had this access to what was going on. They could only look at a handful of spots at any given time. |
| 37:56 | Ashlee Vance | And then you guys had this big idea to… Blast it open. Yeah, instead of making a few of these very expensive satellites. I always think of it a little bit like when we moved from… mainframe and big Unix machines to these clusters of Linux machines. |
| 38:13 | Ashlee Vance | What kind of gave birth to Google was you guys split up the job among a lot of small satellites and then surrounded the earth with hundreds of them. And so you were able to do a couple of things. One was not just have all your eggs in one basket on this $1 billion satellite, |
| 38:30 | Ashlee Vance | but to send up lots of cheap ones and then to clearly surround the earth with this, they’re in this group and they’re just going around and around. So you’re getting not just pictures of a few places, but of everywhere. And you’re getting this historical record keeping. This was a huge idea. |
| 38:47 | Ashlee Vance | It is a very democratizing idea because mostly it was like, the United States and Russia and China and a handful of governments that could usually afford these kinds of things. And now you had a service that people could access on the internet and tap into and get these images. So it was amazing. Like, |
| 39:05 | Ashlee Vance | and I still don’t think most people, enough people understand that this shift has happened over the last decade and we’re in this new world. Tell us, you know, I got burned out after I did the book and the movie. So I’m not up to date on the latest, the greatest of like all of the planets. |
| 39:20 | Will Marshall | I hear you are jiving me for not listening to your podcast episodes. |
| 39:23 | Ashlee Vance | Planet stats. Tell me, tell me, give the audience a feel for how many satellites you have, how much of the earth you’re capturing every day, what types of things you can see with your different satellites. |
| 39:37 | Will Marshall | Sure thing. Yeah. Uh, I think of it as a global sensing revolution and we’re in early days of it, both in the sense that it’s obviously still getting better and better. And even more so in the sense of the exploitation of it, which is, you know, |
| 39:51 | Will Marshall | I would say less than 1% into a big future and AI is accelerating that. And we’ll come back to that, but on the sensing side itself, um, Yeah, we have the majority of our satellites, we have about 180 of the doves or super doves that image the entire land mass of |
| 40:09 | Will Marshall | the Earth once per day at about 10, 30, |
| 40:14 | Will Marshall | 11 a.m. |
| 40:14 | Will Marshall | local time, no matter where you are. and some coastal waters and sea areas. And they do that in eight spectral bands at three meter resolution, all in optical and near infrared. Then we have a separate set of satellites, about 15 satellites that we acquired from Google, which is the Terra Bella acquisition, 50 centimeter resolution, so higher resolution, |
| 40:37 | Will Marshall | but tasked to specific locations of interest. And then one thing that’s totally new since we last caught up, we’ve just launched a first satellite that is a hyperspectral satellite. So this has 420 color bands, just like our eye has three colors. It’s 420 colors spanning a wide spectrum. So it’s starting at 400 nanometers out to 2.5 microns, |
| 41:07 | Will Marshall | which they say if you want to get a quick understanding of something, take a picture. If you want to scientifically measure it, take a spectra. And it can basically tell us what kind of chemicals things are made of on the ground. |
| 41:23 | Will Marshall | It could tell us the type of species of tree or coral reef or grass or what have you on the ground. The shade of paint so well for defense and intelligence applications that they can say, this tank… was made at that factory because their shade of green or whatever it is camouflage |
| 41:42 | Will Marshall | is slightly different from the other factory and so it’s like a fingerprint of objects on the earth and one of the amazing things that can do by the way is detect gas emissions so um turns out methane gas for example absorbs a particular uh set of uh uh of light in a very narrow uh um spectra |
| 42:06 | Will Marshall | And so by looking for that and the ratio between that and other spectral bands nearby, we can actually tell the volume of methane in the column between the satellite and the ground. And so you can measure the amount of methane gas leaking from a facility like a gas |
| 42:24 | Will Marshall | leak or cows farting or from a landfill site or whatever. So that’s a new thing, a new tool in our arsenal. And we did that with NASA JPL and a consortium of players. It’s the most exquisite, it’s the most sensitive hyperspectral instrument in the galaxy, according to people from JPL. |
| 42:43 | Will Marshall | And I don’t know how they determine that, but it’s cool. |
| 42:46 | Ashlee Vance | It is cool. And so you can obviously track all kinds of things. I mean, you can watch construction projects taking place. You can watch Check to See. I know in the Amazon, you used to have to have people on the ground to try to discover when some area was being illegally cut down. |
| 43:05 | Ashlee Vance | It was not an efficient process. It was a dangerous process to go… confront these people report on them now you have a satellite equipped with ai software that just like instantly detects when something like this happens you’ve got the the methane um bits and pieces obviously you well and then agriculture is a |
| 43:22 | Ashlee Vance | huge market knowing if crops are healthy when to harvest them you guys look at like the chlorophyll i think in the in the plants in and can determine this from space um it’s it’s all of it is is extraordinary the um Over the last, there’s a frustration with this to me to some degree. |
| 43:43 | Ashlee Vance | I mean, you guys are a public company now. You’re making tens of millions of dollars per quarter. People are using this technology. They know about it. You have all these huge deals with the governments. When I see the difference in the size of the business between imaging and communications with something like Starlake, |
| 44:02 | Ashlee Vance | And going back to something I said before, obviously there are huge groups of people who know about this technology. I guess sometimes I’m frustrated that it feels like you said 1%. We’ve only scratched the surface with some of this stuff because it seems like such valuable information. |
| 44:18 | Ashlee Vance | I think I talk about it in the book like a Google search engine of the planet and this like real-time accounting system of what’s happening on Earth. Are you surprised that… Is this the pace at which you thought people would know about and use this technology? Or has it gone slower? Yeah, I’m always… |
| 44:41 | Will Marshall | I definitely would hope that it would go faster than it has and in the future. But we’re… The difference between comms, you’re swapping someone from one comms system to another slightly. Here, we’re mainly market making. So most farmers, even though in principle we could help them, in practice they don’t know about it. |
| 45:06 | Will Marshall | They don’t know to use satellite technology. They think that’s far out, or if they’ve even thought about it. When you market making, it takes a little longer. There’s a great article about data companies. And I think of planet as a data company with some cool backend called the satellite, just like Google is a, you know, |
| 45:25 | Will Marshall | not a server company. People think of, uh, uh, as a search company or whatever. Um, but that, um, That little article talks about what the difference is between a data company and a software company and a software company and a hardware company. Data companies tend to take longer to build up because they have to build out the |
| 45:47 | Will Marshall | market, but they tend to be a winner-take-most sort of situation and have very high margins and very high lock-in once you’re there. You used to work at Bloomberg. |
| 45:56 | Will Marshall | Bloomberg, I think, is one of the… They had the ultimate lock-in. |
| 46:00 | Will Marshall | They did. It’s a data company. Not the bit you were working for, but the terminal, Bloomberg Terminal. |
| 46:06 | Ashlee Vance | The part that made money. |
| 46:07 | Will Marshall | The part that made money that paid for your salary was supplying data to financial analysts to help them make smarter decisions on their hedge funds or their insurance or whatever. And we’re doing the same, providing data feeds. That took them a long time to build up, but now it’s a cash machine. In fact, |
| 46:27 | Will Marshall | the banks tried to get together to unseat them and had a real high time even if they undercut the price because the lock-in of having a data set that’s already deep into your workflows. So look, what I’d say is The applications are huge. |
| 46:41 | Will Marshall | We estimate the market to be 50 to 100 billion a year just for our earth imaging data and analytics sitting on top of it. And do I wish we got further first? Yes. I mean, I’m Mr. Impatient, literally, at our company and always going around. But I think that we’re now, because of AI, the takeoff of it. |
| 47:04 | Will Marshall | And I say that with some trepidation because I can’t predict the future, but I really believe that that is bridging a gap. There’s an awareness gap and then there’s a solution gap. Imagine you’re a farmer and you’re trying to improve your crop yield. If we give you some pictures, that’s not very useful, but imagine if we can, |
| 47:24 | Will Marshall | as we now do, automatically extract out your field boundaries of your different fields, automatically say which crop type, is it corn or soy, and automatically figure out which area of the farmer’s field your field is doing less well, needs water, needs fertilizer, needs help in some way. |
| 47:43 | Will Marshall | and helps you do precision agriculture that improves your crop yield by 20 or 40 percent reduces your fertilizer use which is good for you it reduces your costs and it stops the flow of those pollutants into the nearby river good for the planet good for everyone and we’ve aligned our business model so that if that farmer wins |
| 48:04 | Will Marshall | we win and planet wins and so we’ve got the engine there That farmer needs that analytics to bridge that gap. But once we have that, the scaling potential is huge. |
| 48:19 | Ashlee Vance | Is there something that changed? Obviously, Transformers came out in 2018, I think, and then kicked off this wave of immense progress in the AI field. But I remember there were companies like Orbital Insight that were trying to do similar things to what you’re saying. Don’t want to speak out of turn. |
| 48:39 | Ashlee Vance | I think they might not be around anymore. They got bought. So, you know, they had trouble kind of bearing out this business on, but we’re on it very early. Has something changed in the last couple of years to make that type of analysis more, you know, either productive or useful, I guess? |
| 48:59 | Will Marshall | Yes. I mean, incredibly so. So we’ve been working with AI for years, but using convolutional neural nets, CNNs that enable us to bespoke trainer model. We do building detection, road detection, airplane detection, ship detection. We provide those feeds. You can circle ports, get reports of the number of ships in these ports. |
| 49:24 | Will Marshall | So I can give you some concrete examples. But what the LLMs are doing, because of that transformer development, or as I like to think of it, the foundation model work, because they’ve now broadened out from just language to be multimodal, so they can take in audio or visual imagery or video. |
| 49:49 | Will Marshall | As they went multimodal, the relevance to satellite imagery is just huge. It means you can automatically search for things without having to have trained any model. You can show a satellite image to Claude or Gemini or ChatGBT, and it will have a fairly good description of it out of the gate. |
| 50:09 | Will Marshall | And then you can show a picture from a week earlier or a year earlier and say, what’s changed? And it will have a fairly good description of that without having to have any expertise. Our team was looking at this and we were like, can it just estimate land use change over time, |
| 50:27 | Will Marshall | plot some pie graphs of the changes? Yep, no problem. Can it count new roads or buildings? No problem. And so… In 2018, I’d done this TED talk, Queerable Earth, where I said Google’s mission was to index the internet and make it searchable. Planet’s mission is to index the earth and make it searchable. |
| 50:50 | Will Marshall | The confluence of, that was seven years ago. Now, LLMs basically make that really tractable. Just imagine, all these LLMs that you play with online, which are really cool, are basically restricted to the information on the internet. So you can answer your questions about the text on the internet, basically. Imagine that we suddenly pull in the physical Earth, |
| 51:20 | Will Marshall | and now you can answer questions about the physical Earth, about all the trees, about the coral reefs, about the roads, about the vehicles, about anything you want to know about what’s going on on the Earth. in real time every day. The number of use cases of that is gigantic. |
| 51:36 | Will Marshall | And I think we are unlocking that at a pace that was, so we were going a bit slow on some of that analytics. And I think it was hard for those companies that were just in the analytics space for that reason. But now we’re at takeoff. |
| 51:50 | Ashlee Vance | And you guys have more images than probably anyone else. Yeah. And so in, you mentioned the farming example, like what’s another one that’s blown you away? |
| 52:01 | Will Marshall | Um, so what another application of AI, let me give two more, uh, one in, uh, sustainability and with civil government. So we work with the Brazilian federal police. We monitor 8 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon. Their problem is, how can I detect where the deforestation is? So we’re already imaging all of the Brazilian Amazon. |
| 52:27 | Will Marshall | We take that, use AI to look for new roads. Where it finds new roads, that’s a sign of illegal deforestation or illegal narcotics or illegal mining. We find all three. They then send people out to stop that. They did 3,000 interventions last year, confiscating $3 billion worth of assets. |
| 52:51 | Will Marshall | And sometimes they sent us videos of them putting dynamite on them and blowing them up. And most of all, they reduced deforestation rates by more than half. So they halved the deforestation rate. |
| 53:03 | Ashlee Vance | So dynamite is on the mine and not some person. |
| 53:07 | Will Marshall | On the machinery that they confiscated, yeah. The problem is if they just took it to the local police, Then it went back round again. So they decided to take a different tactic, dynamite them, and then they won’t come back round again. That’s one strategy. Another one is in the security field. And obviously federal police, |
| 53:27 | Will Marshall | it’s sort of got some security implications, tracking narcotics and other things. But in the deeper security space, we’ve been working closely with Ukraine and helping them with understanding threats deep into Russia, understanding, giving warning of those things really early. So we image all of Ukraine, all of Belarus, all of Russia every day, and they track, |
| 53:51 | Will Marshall | they use AI to find changes and not just of military capabilities, but of industrial capabilities that might be supplying a supply chain that they want to stop, right? And they do battle damage assessment, whether it’s the Russians have hit them or they hit the Russians. What has happened? Has they succeeded or not? |
| 54:12 | Will Marshall | They do it for planning their drone flights. Half of their drones weren’t coming back when they sent. They have these ISR drones, so imagery drones that went up to go back to understand what was going on. But half of them were being shot down and not coming back. So instead, now they just look in our imagery |
| 54:30 | Will Marshall | and if there’s no changes they don’t need to send that drone saving them billions of dollars but integrated into all of this is ai because it’s a huge area um they’re monitoring 18 million square kilometers every day so that brazil is doing eight but this time for security threats not for deforestation and they’re alerting |
| 54:48 | Will Marshall | themselves so whilst ukraine has a seven to one tank and troop disadvantage to russia they’ve had a massive information advantage because of satellites and ai and so I think the security implications of satellites and AI are huge. And we’ve always said our main mission is sustainability and security. And those things are increasingly coupled. |
| 55:10 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah, I mean, I wrote about this in the book and have written about it subsequently. I mean, I would argue the Russia-Ukraine war was our first space war in some ways from the very first, well, before the war even kicked off. It was often planets imagery that was appearing on the front page of the New York |
| 55:29 | Ashlee Vance | Times or on CNN of the Russian troops amassing in Belarus. And Putin said he wasn’t going to attack. |
| 55:35 | Will Marshall | Well, what’s all this then? |
| 55:36 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah. And then we had, we had photos, obviously Starlink has been used a lot by Ukraine. Yeah. Do you think, do you think the, so, and again, um, This is not just because you’re sitting here. I mean, I argue this stuff all the time. I mean, I think people underestimate how valuable this technology has been. |
| 55:58 | Ashlee Vance | You can make a pretty convincing case, I think, that, I mean, who knows how the simulation would play out, but that Kyiv would likely have fallen without some of these technological assets in the early days of the war. Do you, no one would know this, better, really, than you. I mean, |
| 56:20 | Ashlee Vance | do you think the Russians were caught off guard by… Obviously, they knew this technology existed. Do you think they were just caught off guard by how it would be used, the fact that all this… When their troops were getting stuck on the way to Kiev, I mean, it was just a massive morale busting. Yeah, |
| 56:42 | Ashlee Vance | to see these images that no government could spin because they were coming from a neutral party. And it just immediately took away… Not that the Russian army isn’t scary, but this thought of this unstoppable monster going up against this much smaller… I mean, it was just like, God, these guys look kind of incompetent. |
| 57:08 | Ashlee Vance | I just feel like it really changed things. And then not to mention, then they would go on to… We didn’t bomb a hospital. And then you have a picture of, well, it was a hospital yesterday. All these things for their propaganda campaign. Yeah. Do you think they were caught off guard? I do. |
| 57:24 | Will Marshall | I think they were caught off guard by two things. One is the fact that Ukrainians thought they had a country and Russia thought that they didn’t. They actually believed in that country. And so I think… Bizarrely enough, they didn’t think they would. And they got caught off guard by the technology and innovation. |
| 57:45 | Will Marshall | And obviously, necessity is the mother of invention. So Ukraine was being very deft in leveraging these new tools and applying them. Obviously, with support from the West, intelligence and other things that has been supported. But yeah, I think that early on it made a very big difference to the success or otherwise of |
| 58:05 | Will Marshall | Russia in just taking Ukraine in the first place and subsequently in holding accountability across the boards. We’ve also helped all the NGOs that have been there trying to supply medicines, the world food program and trying to get grain out of Ukraine because half the poorest countries in the world |
| 58:25 | Will Marshall | were being fed by grain from Ukraine as a bread basket and literally half of the World Food Programme’s grain was coming from Ukraine. So helping them get it out, various other humanitarian things. But I think one of the most understated thing is just how everyone could see what was going on in real time. |
| 58:43 | Will Marshall | Not only did they make a mistake in that, but the question now on everyone’s mind, I think, is what implications does it have going forward for geopolitics? Now countries know that everything is going to be viewable to everyone, so they can’t just make shit up. |
| 59:00 | Will Marshall | And Putin may not have guessed that that was going to be exposed so readily, but future countries now know that that’s what’s going to happen. And they can shield some of that from their own people, as Russia has done. But it’s hard when you’re in a hearts and minds campaign for the whole world and |
| 59:23 | Will Marshall | everyone gets to see these images and these images don’t lie. And so, yeah, I think it played an important role there, an unstated role. I don’t think it was the first space war, by the way. I think Iraq was the first space war, but that was all government. |
| 59:38 | Will Marshall | Right. This is the first commercial one and it has it in the cold war might be the first space war in a way. |
| 59:44 | Will Marshall | Yeah. But, but Iraq was the, where, where space was integrated into their military operations, comes out GPS guided missiles, all this, but this was the first time everyone else got to use it. |
| 59:56 | Ashlee Vance | That’s what I mean. I think of it as this, where the, you actually had commercial technology that was, was better than what the, at least better in some cases and quite different than what the military had. |
| 1:00:07 | Will Marshall | Yeah, absolutely, and various organizations were using it. The NGO, the people looking for war crimes, all the other countries that are trying to support Ukraine, Ukraine itself, a common operating picture between them, the news media, the think tanks shedding light on what’s going on, open source intelligence communities that are triangulating our data, cell phone data, |
| 1:00:33 | Will Marshall | this to find out what’s going on and get to the truth of things. And in a world where we see more and more misinformation online, driven by algorithms and incentive structures that are misaligned, Here we have a situation where we can triangulate truth to bring that truth and get back onto a common operating picture. |
| 1:00:54 | Will Marshall | I think an under-appreciated point about planet, people think about planet and saving forests and stuff. One under-appreciated point is how much role we can play in security and how important that is, that transparency and accountability. Another thing is the implication for everyone to have a more clear common operating picture of what’s going on. |
| 1:01:18 | Will Marshall | And we have lost a little bit of that. You know, we can’t agree whether climate change is real, who won the last presidential election, do vaccines work? Well, here’s a way in which we can get back onto a common picture, literally a common picture of what’s happening. And you can argue about interpretations of the picture, |
| 1:01:35 | Will Marshall | but in the end, the picture’s saying what the picture’s saying, |
| 1:01:37 | Will Marshall | you know. |
| 1:01:38 | Ashlee Vance | But since I’ve known you, I mean, you’ve always been, I think on the side of more information, I would say on the side of truth and justice and knowledge and things like that. But you, and I, you know, I’ve written about this, but I don’t, a lot of people probably don’t know you still, because of this, |
| 1:01:57 | Ashlee Vance | you can end up getting caught between opposing forces who don’t, may or may not want your images out there. And whether you do Russia, Ukraine, whether you do Israel, um, I feel like this last few years must’ve been quite interesting for you in terms of the phone calls that you’re getting. And, and it seems, |
| 1:02:20 | Ashlee Vance | it seems like sort of awful to be the, in some cases, I imagine the decision goes up to you and to be this like arbiter on, on what the public gets to know or not know. |
| 1:02:35 | Will Marshall | Well, there’s a lot of it and it’s very sensitive and we get yanked in to these world events. I mean, I can be on a weekend, but if Iran, Israel is erupting, it’ll definitely pull us in. We’re sort of involved directly. |
| 1:02:55 | Will Marshall | And I think it’s critical that we are on the side of giving the data out to all the parties. because then it’s less likely that they will make mistakes. History is full of examples where people made assumptions or mistakes because of lack of information. And then that led to more escalation into war. |
| 1:03:17 | Will Marshall | I think the more we have a transparency of what’s going on, the less likely that is economically in the cold war. There’s a Russians putting missiles in Cuba. almost led to it going hot or vice versa when the US put missiles in Turkey that the Russians didn’t know about, that it almost got hot. |
| 1:03:33 | Will Marshall | It was not when they knew where each other’s stuff was at. When they knew where each other’s stuff was at, it was more peaceful. And I think that lesson is what we took in to our theory of change on the security side for planet. So our thinking is, we don’t always give to all people, terrorist organizations, |
| 1:03:56 | Will Marshall | North Korea and the likes of countries that are embargoed under US law and so on. Generally, we will give it to anyone that will pay for it, but we won’t be doing that exclusively. So if Reuters want it, Reuters can have it. If the UN wants it, they can have it. |
| 1:04:16 | Will Marshall | If Israel wants it, they can have it. And everyone can triangulate what’s going on, and we think that’s a good thing. |
| 1:04:22 | Ashlee Vance | Okay, I’m going to give you a couple tough questions now. Go right ahead. I don’t know before. You have. Okay, and sometimes I find your answers satisfying and sometimes not. So let’s find out. I mean, the U.S. government is one of your biggest customers. So how can somebody trust When you say some of these things, |
| 1:04:44 | Ashlee Vance | because obviously they might come to you on some occasions and be like, please don’t put that picture out. And, and you’re on the side of wanting this information to be out there, but you’ve, you’ve, they’re one of your biggest customers on, on many different fronts. Yeah. |
| 1:04:59 | Ashlee Vance | I mean, how, um, this must be a very hard calculus to go through. |
| 1:05:04 | Will Marshall | for sure well let me say um the u.s government has never asked us not to give an image out okay and they have almost always defended our ability to provide imagery when other countries that put pressure on us so we have never stopped doing that um |
| 1:05:20 | Will Marshall | look we are very proud of partnering with the u.s government for all the reasons that that it i think is an empowering tool for all countries to have greater understanding of security threats um we work with the nro we work with nasa we work with Space force and truth is power. And I think that’s really important. |
| 1:05:41 | Will Marshall | And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, information advantage can be critical. And I’m on the side of more open societies, and this data is less threatening to more open societies than to more closed ones. And I think that’s a good thing. Does everyone agree with that? No, but that’s where we stand. |
| 1:06:03 | Ashlee Vance | Well, and when I was doing the movie, I mean, the biggest question that I got from people was, okay, and we talked about this a little bit, but you were, you know, I call you space hippies in the book, which I know you guys don’t always love, but I mean, in a lovely way, I mean, you were, |
| 1:06:21 | Ashlee Vance | you, as a youngster, you were, um, you were fighting the militarization of, of space. You were part of a group of young idealistic Kids, you started Planet. I don’t even think it was really meant to fully be like a for-profit enterprise at the beginning. I mean, the very foundation of it was to understand the earth. |
| 1:06:40 | Ashlee Vance | And obviously, look, I mean, you end up running a public company. This business needs money to grow and survive. You have deals with all kinds of governments. I mean, this was the question I got over and over again, especially… from other people was kind of like, how do you rationalize that? And you would always tell me, |
| 1:07:03 | Ashlee Vance | I think you were more of like a scientist than a capitalist or, you know, and have, I would say, you can say how you characterize it. It was sort of socialist, monetary philosophies you know around your own life so i i have always wondered how |
| 1:07:21 | Ashlee Vance | you square all these things in your head because you are a you’re a you’re a super bright thoughtful person and it seems like an impossible number of conflicts to me |
| 1:07:32 | Will Marshall | yeah let me try and be as clear as i can on the security one first We are enabling transparency that enables trans accountability on the earth that I think will lead to more peace and global peace and prosperity. And on sustainability, the connections are obvious, you know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, track all the trees, |
| 1:07:57 | Will Marshall | check all the coral reefs and, um, there’s huge business value there’s an agricultural insurance finance and all that um and that is a tool that enables us to scale more i personally think our mission is more important than the business i think you’d find that for a lot of companies |
| 1:08:20 | Will Marshall | you know google here wasn’t started as a focused on the business and revenue it was focused on access to information. We have that bigger purpose. We’re not Google or Google scale, but we have that missionary purpose as more important than anything else. And I’ll continue to stand by that. |
| 1:08:42 | Will Marshall | But the security piece fits in and security and sustainability are completely coupled these days. Security situations lead to sustainability ones and vice versa. I already just gave you the example in Ukraine. Because of the war, the food wasn’t getting out to the people that needed it. So it was leading to a food security issue around the world. |
| 1:09:05 | Will Marshall | You have other examples like Syria. had a drought because of climate that led to a crop failure, that led to civil unrest, that led to refugees in the neighboring countries and in Europe. Those things are coupled. The Pentagon’s top threat often talks about the top few threats to the United States. |
| 1:09:26 | Will Marshall | Always, no matter your ideology at the top and your political leanings, It, because it is fully rationalized about and looking at these things, puts climate as one of the top threats. Why? Because droughts and heat waves and what have you lead to more unrest that it then has to worry about in terms of threats around the world. |
| 1:09:50 | Will Marshall | So climate and environment and security are totally interlinked. And that’s why, to me, it’s not a… one or the other or reconciling one and we’re getting military contracts so that we can do impact work over here on deforestation not at all it is coupled i mean the |
| 1:10:12 | Will Marshall | brazil case kind of gives you that sense right i mean they’re they’re there stopping illegal action and stopping deforestation and it’s all it’s all there um That’s how I see it fitting in. And vis-a-vis the capitalist side of it, Chris Kemp often tweaks me on this. He’s like, you’re an excellent capitalist, see? |
| 1:10:35 | Ashlee Vance | And I’m like… You’re a better capitalist than Chris is at the moment. |
| 1:10:39 | Will Marshall | Well, he does find that ironic sometimes. Yeah. For me, I want to lean in to the engine of growth to enable this mission. |
| 1:10:51 | Ashlee Vance | But if you’re anti- If your personal leanings are to kind of question some of these systems. |
| 1:11:01 | Will Marshall | My personal leanings is to question almost everything. Have you met me? |
| 1:11:05 | Ashlee Vance | Yes, but then you end up… People should know. I’ve known you for a long time. I would not… if i’m being honest i would not have uh seen you as like a public company ceo you know what i mean you you were um i always thought of you like oh this is kind of |
| 1:11:26 | Ashlee Vance | like a do-gooder kind of guy you know and and not that you again we’ve been over a bunch of reasons how you are i think um I also thought you might have just lost interest in running a business, doing all this. |
| 1:11:40 | Will Marshall | Losing interest in saving the planet? |
| 1:11:42 | Ashlee Vance | No, but you were such a scientist at heart. And I would imagine, well, now I am a CEO. So I know. I mean, there’s things that come with doing the job that is pretty far from what I want to be doing, which is writing stories and making videos and things like that. |
| 1:12:01 | Will Marshall | Well, sometimes I miss tweaking satellite stuff in the lab, but honestly, it is offset by the impact that we are having, whether it’s in Ukraine or in Brazil, as the examples we’ve been talking about, or that farmer, every day. And the ability for me to help enable hundreds of people at Planet to do that mission |
| 1:12:25 | Will Marshall | by raising capital or by helping to make connections that enable that partnership with NATO or what have you, is fulfilling because of the outcome and more than just enabling those people to plan it, enabling thousands of customers to leverage the benefit of that information. Now, |
| 1:12:46 | Will Marshall | I want it to be hundreds of thousands of customers and millions of customers because I believe we’re only 1% or less of our journey in terms of business and in terms of impact, and they are aligned in our case. And so I’m not going to stop until we’ve scaled this and I feel very good about our |
| 1:13:07 | Will Marshall | business right now. We’ve got a lot of momentum on our side and I’m leaning in. AI is an accelerant and All these things. |
| 1:13:14 | Ashlee Vance | You don’t have sleepless nights in your communal house. |
| 1:13:17 | Will Marshall | I sometimes have sleepless nights, but not often. Not often. I’m a pretty good sleeper, actually. |
| 1:13:23 | Ashlee Vance | Why has… As far as I’m aware, I mean, has… There’s obviously other imaging companies, but has like China built something that’s equivalent or roughly? |
| 1:13:35 | Will Marshall | No one’s doing a daily scan as yet. And the other imaging companies in the West are all doing less than 1% of the landmass of the earth. So people often go, oh, there’s Max Airbus. They’re all doing very different things. If you look under the hood, it’s not like comparing two electric car companies. |
| 1:13:57 | Will Marshall | We are scanning the whole earth, which opens up agriculture, which is 30% of the landmass of the earth. And so you can’t do it if you’re only imaging 1% of the landmass of the earth, like Max or Airbus or Black Sky and all these guys. They have an application that’s very cool. |
| 1:14:12 | Will Marshall | And we do some of that too with our high res, but it’s actually quite different applications. So I don’t see it as particularly competitive. The Chinese have started to build a system somewhat similar to us called Jilin, which hasn’t yet done a daily scan, but it’s impressive what they’re building, |
| 1:14:30 | Will Marshall | and it’s good to get the competitive juices going. |
| 1:14:34 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah, well, I know, look, you guys do many sophisticated things, and this is not easy. Are you surprised that there hasn’t been a more direct competitor? |
| 1:14:45 | Will Marshall | Not really, it’s really hard. I mean, you know, as I like to say, powerpoint satellites are easy and actual satellites are really hard so not many organizations can actually pull it off to launch and operate not just one satellite but actually make it work to then do hundreds of satellites the mission control |
| 1:15:03 | Will Marshall | systems the ground station systems the data processing systems it is not for the faint of heart and so most of them fall over before they get to that scale we’ve got an incredible team that has incredible skill sets in this department, starting with a core team that we took from NASA. |
| 1:15:21 | Will Marshall | And I was so proud that 10 years in, when we celebrated our 10th anniversary a couple of years ago, seven of the 10 first employees at Planet were still at Planet. That institutional knowledge we have, and some people leave and we call them boomerangers because they almost always come straight back. |
| 1:15:40 | Will Marshall | They go to SpaceX, they go to Google, and then they realize that it’s better at Planet. |
| 1:15:45 | Ashlee Vance | I will attest to some of that. It’s a good company culture. I’m looking at how much time I’ve taken up. There’s still a few things I was hoping to get to. You okay? Yeah. Do you, why did you guys, again, this is a question I’ve never asked you, even though I probably shouldn’t have. |
| 1:16:03 | Ashlee Vance | Do you regret not doing communications alongside all of this? You’d be like a multi, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar business if you beat, beat. Maybe if we were to pull it off. |
| 1:16:15 | Will Marshall | I mean, one of the things I give credit to SpaceX for The execution on Starlink, I think I was the first non-SpaceX user of Starlink because I have a rural property and I needed internet. And so I called a friend. I called Elon and got him to send me one. |
| 1:16:36 | Will Marshall | I’m pretty sure before he’d sent any others outside of SpaceX. And it’s impressive what they have. And this was way before it was an operational system. You could occasionally get internet access. But that’s a hard job. And one of the things that’s really hard about it is getting to the scale that gets to global coverage consistently. |
| 1:16:56 | Will Marshall | Because it’s kind of not useful if you can only get three minutes a day of uptime in your rural property. Maybe it’s useful for some applications, but generally you want the communications on all the time. So until you get enough satellites to do the global coverage, there’s an order of 1,000 satellites. |
| 1:17:11 | Will Marshall | That we didn’t have the capital to do. Whereas in earth imaging, if you get a couple of satellite stuff, you can already start selling that information. So the entry barrier was much lower. Then, on the other side, I think the applications are much stronger. I mean, not to take away from the applications and communications airlines, tele-education, tele-medicine, |
| 1:17:31 | Will Marshall | all these fantastic things. Watching Netflix. Watching Netflix. Then, on Earth Observation, look at the challenges around the world. We’re pulled into sustainability, security. We’re relevant to… all the things to do with food security, water security. Look, the UN has the Sustainable Development Goals, basically a list of the world’s biggest challenges, poverty, and so on. |
| 1:18:04 | Will Marshall | We estimated that we can help 14 of those 17 goals in terms of measuring it, and if you don’t measure it, you can’t really achieve it, and 140 of the 200 and something sub-indicators under those 17 goals. I mean, our data set is in principle relevant to so many of the world’s challenges. |
| 1:18:22 | Will Marshall | So I think the impact mission of planet is much bigger than communication satellites will ever be. |
| 1:18:28 | Ashlee Vance | You could probably, this is what I feel though, is ever since this AI race took off, people seem to talk about climate change a lot less all of a sudden. In the last election, it wasn’t even a big deal. |
| 1:18:40 | Ashlee Vance | And then now I think we’ve all given over to this idea that, well, this is the next big thing. We’ve got a race there. It’s going to take a lot of energy. There’s a race dynamic in AI. And then it’s always, it’s like, well, well, but then the AI is going to figure out climate change, |
| 1:18:54 | Ashlee Vance | so it’s going to fix it. Let’s just get there first. |
| 1:18:58 | Will Marshall | Yeah, I mean, that race dynamic is obviously present between the companies and between countries, between the US and China. But let me just talk about how it’s relevant for Planet for a minute, because it’s just unlocking everything. As I already sort of mentioned, it’s accelerating our querible Earth vision of indexing what’s on the Earth and |
| 1:19:17 | Will Marshall | making it searchable. But the speed at which that is happening, the basic ways in which that helps our users is… um helps them speed time to value go from zero to an answer if you’re that farmer that i sort of had you imagine earlier you don’t want to look at all the images you |
| 1:19:39 | Will Marshall | just want to type in a question hey what should i do to improve my crop yield oh you should look at this area of that field and add some fertilizers or what have you um or this blind coordinate off whatever it is the action AI is enabling it, so speeding time to value. |
| 1:19:57 | Will Marshall | And then there’s democratizing it, the other way. Because whilst it was just the big companies, we work with Bayer as an agriculture company. They look at millions of farmers video every day with our data. But that’s all very well for them, big ag company. how they have a geospatial team. |
| 1:20:15 | Will Marshall | But what about that individual farmland that doesn’t have that geospatial team? So it’s democratizing. So it’s speeding time to value and it’s democratizing. If I put a slightly bigger philosophical picture together for you, again, it’s the All these AIs, chat, GBT, and so on, are just talking about the text of the internet. |
| 1:20:36 | Will Marshall | And here we have the potential to now be able to chat interface with the Earth and everything on the Earth in the physical world. And bringing in that physical layer into the chat bots will enable huge applications across sustainability, security, digital transformation, and so on that I think are vast. Also, |
| 1:21:01 | Will Marshall | I’d like to point out that a lot of people left Silicon Valley because they were like, oh, it’s going to be better in LA and Texas and Florida. And they’ve all come back with a tail between their legs because all the coolest shit is happening here. |
| 1:21:15 | Will Marshall | And we are in the middle of what I call the AI triangle. We’re a few blocks from the Anthropic team, which we’ve announced a partnership with. We’re a few blocks from Google Gemini team, which is not actually down here in Mountain View. |
| 1:21:27 | Will Marshall | It’s the Gemini team doing that cool stuff is all up in San Francisco and a few blocks from the OpenAI team. So we feel in the thick of it and we are in the thick of this revolution that’s happening in AI that enables the extraction of value from our data set. |
| 1:21:48 | Will Marshall | Our data set is uniquely able to do that. |
| 1:21:52 | Ashlee Vance | No, and I appreciate everything you’re saying about the technology where it’s going. I just, yeah, I get a little depressed because I feel like some of the attention, we had this like peak for a while when people were super into climate change, we had all this money going into green tech companies. |
| 1:22:09 | Ashlee Vance | It just feels to me like a lot of things that you care about. |
| 1:22:13 | Will Marshall | I think, as I said, AI companies are going to have to proactively steer that technology. Otherwise, their default path will be to accelerate our blowing up of the planetary boundaries. Obviously, I feel like we’re part of that. I think we’re part of it. We can help make AI safer and we can help use AI to save life. |
| 1:22:34 | Will Marshall | So, like… If we want AI to care about life, including humans, we want it to know about that stuff. So we don’t want to just train it on the text of the internet, have it tell us about Wikipedia. We want it to know about all the trees and the corals and all the living things. |
| 1:22:51 | Will Marshall | So we better start feeding in that information. So we’ve got our own existential interest in training about that. And then there’s business interest because obviously you want the real, if you’re trying to tackle real world problems with AI, you want real world data. If you want to do an insurance claim or respond to a disaster, |
| 1:23:09 | Will Marshall | you’re not going to do that with fake data. You need real data. You can’t just imagine that data. For all these reasons, I see a confluence of what AI is doing is going to need our data to both for business reasons, to have a better understanding of the world, and for environmental reasons, to have, you know, |
| 1:23:35 | Will Marshall | if we’re going to tackle climate change, it needs all the data about climate change, right? And they’re going to have to steer it actively towards that if we’re going to have a good future here. |
| 1:23:44 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah. Okay, we’re going to go a little rapid fire round. It doesn’t have to be, but it could be. And some of these are a bit random. So, you know, you not only predicted, but helped usher in this massive breakthrough with the price performance of satellites, as I write about in the book. |
| 1:24:04 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah, you know, you kind of brought Moore’s Law to space. It’s in many ways more dramatic than we’ve even seen with the fall of… Rocket launches and the price of getting something to space. |
| 1:24:15 | Will Marshall | Yeah, it’s 1,000x over 4x for the rocket, yeah. |
| 1:24:17 | Ashlee Vance | Yeah, and there’s, okay, so there’s millions of wacky ideas around where space is heading and what’s going on. I feel like you’re such a good person to ask, given your history. I mean, what’s something that, like, most people wouldn’t think about that you think will actually happen in space in the next, I mean, |
| 1:24:37 | Ashlee Vance | you can pick your time period, 20 to 50 years. |
| 1:24:40 | Will Marshall | Dirty infrastructure into space. Yeah. Yeah, energy, production, compute. I think that putting server farms in space is a no-brainer. Once you get to a certain launch cost per kilogram, you don’t have to clean the solar panels and cool it. You just do that automatically and have these data centers upstairs automatically online. That didn’t make sense. |
| 1:25:08 | Will Marshall | few years ago it still doesn’t quite make sense but it is on the verge of i think that’s important because we can take that dirty infrastructure off earth less pressure on our ecosystems so it’s it’s a win in lots of different ways um as an example. So I see, I mean, we’re already going in that direction. |
| 1:25:26 | Will Marshall | I mean, this launch we have in a couple of weeks here from Vandenberg, we have the latest Nvidia chips on it with the ability to do AI processing at the edge. We’ve done this partnership with Nvidia. You just imagine having more compute at the edge to do that processing there. |
| 1:25:43 | Will Marshall | That means just like recognizing those ships right there. And then as soon as you take the picture and then sending down the latitude and longitude of the ships to the people that really need that. Rather than waiting for it to download the whole data, which might take longer over a ground station or what have you. |
| 1:25:58 | Will Marshall | We’re going to see that will speed up, make our insights more real time. And, and it’s sort of a stepping stone towards putting the compute itself upstairs. |
| 1:26:14 | Ashlee Vance | And then I know you care about this cause you used to work on space debris at NASA. Um, I, can you give me an answer better than like, I kind of don’t know how this is going to play out. I mean, as far as we’re sending tens of thousands of satellites to space, what you just talked about, |
| 1:26:31 | Ashlee Vance | we’re going to send even more stuff. I know you worry about this type of thing. Um, Don’t see, I know there’s some stuff in Japan and a little thing here and there. Don’t see a lot of people working on space debris on trying to avoid these things running into each other and what would happen. I don’t know. |
| 1:26:49 | Ashlee Vance | I mean, what’s your current feeling on this and any reason for optimism? Well, yeah, |
| 1:26:57 | Will Marshall | I think the reason for optimism is that actually relatively simple things can ensure that we don’t cause a problem, like keeping the satellites lower. where the atmosphere of the Earth just self-cleans those orbits. I mean, they still re-enter the top of the atmosphere, but we’re still talking tiny amounts of actual mass compared with other pollutants |
| 1:27:15 | Will Marshall | and other things we put in the atmosphere, and it’s mostly inert substances. And don’t worry, it won’t fall on your head because they don’t actually survive re-entry, so they just burn up like a shooting star. Keeping stuff low is the way forward. The bigger problem is not satellites, but the debris, |
| 1:27:35 | Will Marshall | which are the leftover bits of satellites when satellites blow up and things. And there, practices like draining the tank before you end life, the satellite, it means that if there’s a spark, it doesn’t blow up. We’ve been doing that for decades now, but there’s a lot of stuff still there. I think there’s two big… |
| 1:27:56 | Will Marshall | two or three big things we’ve got to do going forward. One is we’ve got to ban anti-satellite technology. That is the deliberate kinetic blowing up, which some countries have been doing, which China, the US, India, and others have done in recent years, which causes bigger mess. I mean, in one go, you make 10,000 pieces of |
| 1:28:17 | Will Marshall | of debris that you can’t even track because it’s so small and that could be catastrophic to collide with other satellites. So we’ve got to stop that. It’s an asymmetric environment in space, not like on the land, sea and air where collisions, the debris actually can be collected. In space it can’t, it causes a long-term problem. |
| 1:28:34 | Will Marshall | So we have to think differently about kinetic action in space and I think it should just be banned outright by all the countries. The second thing is mega constellations need to stay low, not just have propulsion. Because propulsion, the problem is even if one in a hundred of the satellites, a propulsion system fails, |
| 1:28:54 | Will Marshall | and even if you have redundancies, you still have a lot of dead mass up in orbit, so you can’t de-orbit it at the end of life. So I think we’ve got to stay way low. And then the third thing, ultimately, we’re going to need some sort of traffic management system and debris removal services. |
| 1:29:13 | Will Marshall | And you said there are not many people working on that. So that’s right. But there are ways. One scheme, one of the few good ideas myself and a few others came up with at NASA was a laser scheme for nudging space debris. So you propagate forward all the positions of the space. |
| 1:29:29 | Will Marshall | the known pieces of debris if two are going to collide you nudge one using light pressure so the light just nudges it so that it misses the other piece and then it stops the cascade with one laser system in one telescope in the uh pole you need in |
| 1:29:44 | Will Marshall | antarctica or the arctic um you can nudge most and be sort of like a traffic cop for the debris so there’s a laser original cascade at the pole no there needs to be |
| 1:29:54 | Ashlee Vance | no no no but you would have a laser at the pole and it would would be monitoring what’s going on with these radars around the world and then and |
| 1:30:02 | Will Marshall | then it would just blasts it wouldn’t blast it it’s not like ablating it it’s literally photon pressure says they miss each other so if you two see two look at a client you just nudge it it’s ever so slight but you just want to stop those places |
| 1:30:16 | Will Marshall | where it actually collides because that that is the form the beginning of the kessel syndrome right is the collisional cascade that you’re trying to avoid but with a little bit of nudging you can be a traffic cop that stops the collisional cascade. |
| 1:30:32 | Will Marshall | So I think that’s the kind of thing we need to do in order to have traffic management long term. |
| 1:30:38 | Ashlee Vance | You’re friends with lots of very rich people. Have you ever pitched them on this idea? |
| 1:30:41 | Will Marshall | Actually, I pitched NASA on it, and unfortunately, it was too cheap. NASA doesn’t know what to do with projects that are under a billion dollars. So this was only going to cost 10 or 20 million. And I was like, gosh. There’s been some really interesting projects on it subsequently, |
| 1:30:56 | Will Marshall | including by the Australians that have been testing a laser through a telescope system there to nudge debris. And I haven’t caught up on the latest, but I think that’s the system that needs to happen. We’ve got a little bit of time because it’s been the very early part of the exponent on the Kessler syndrome, |
| 1:31:11 | Will Marshall | but we need to get on it. |
| 1:31:14 | Will Marshall | in the coming years all right i promised to end on a positive question right before that you worked at nasa for a long time you were quite controversial while you were there you mentioned they don’t love to do cheap projects that was a a problem you |
| 1:31:29 | Ashlee Vance | kept running into you did a low-cost lunar lander that you had to hide because it was so yeah and then there was the phones in space right yeah almost got fired yeah And I know the US government is a big customer and we all love NASA in our heart. |
| 1:31:46 | Ashlee Vance | But quite easy to argue, seen better days in many ways. What should NASA be doing? What would you change to NASA right now if you were the administrator? |
| 1:32:00 | Will Marshall | Well, good question. I mean, I think that… We could do more science and exploration for less money. |
| 1:32:10 | Ashlee Vance | Let’s pretend right now you’re the administrator, and they have to say yes to two or three things. |
| 1:32:19 | Will Marshall | Well, I’m biased, but I would lean it more into commercial things. Take this Tanager mission I just mentioned, the hyperspectral satellite. That was this collaboration between us and JPL. It was going to cost 300 million per spacecraft to do that in the Earth systems budget. |
| 1:32:37 | Will Marshall | Now we can pump out that spacecraft for about six or seven million, including launch. It took us some real R&D to get there, but now it’s tens of millions of dollars, but then now we can pump them out. So we can launch a fleet of them, vastly lower costs. |
| 1:32:52 | Will Marshall | So the collaboration between NASA’s exquisite instruments and commercials making things cheaper and more affordable at scale can allow you not just to do the same thing, but to do the same thing with less money and faster. So I would apply that general rule across a wide variety. Now, there’s going to be some things that NASA |
| 1:33:13 | Will Marshall | You can’t do that way. And I’m protective of NASA because I used to work there and I feel some of the recent decisions have been, what do they say? Ready, fire, aim. You know, it’s been decisions before thinking through how to do it in a smart way. The intent has been very good, I think. |
| 1:33:38 | Will Marshall | How do we figure out how to do this cheaper? There’s been a revolution in space, in rockets and satellites. How do we do this cheaper? The intent, I think, makes a lot of sense. We’ve just got to do it with a little bit more precision. |
| 1:33:50 | Will Marshall | And I think companies like Planet stand ready to really help with that if we can. |
| 1:33:56 | Ashlee Vance | I wasn’t the ruthless NASA administrator answer that I was expecting. Okay, last one. Is there one particular image you’ve pulled down from your satellites that is the most memorable to you? |
| 1:34:12 | Will Marshall | Well, it’s probably our very first image. I can see it still in my eye that it was of an area in Oregon with forests and agricultural land and just to see the resolution because you can you know that you believe in the physics equations if you there’s this telescope size at this distance in orbit we should be |
| 1:34:33 | Will Marshall | able to see this level size object on the ground but until you actually fly you don’t know for sure when that image came down it was huge for us and it showed everything then was just about scaling just about scaling that’s still hard but like it was |
| 1:34:48 | Will Marshall | just um that and uh um so yeah i still remember that very first image well that |
| 1:34:54 | Ashlee Vance | makes i mean that makes a ton of sense people can watch the movie read the book for some of the backstory but but was born out of this idea that began just sending cell phones up in the space on the hunch that maybe |
| 1:35:09 | Will Marshall | Consumer electronics would work in space and we’d be able to do spacecraft this 1,000x-ish cheaper. You said it at the beginning, mainframes to desktop computer sort of transition for the space industry. And that still hasn’t taken off even as much as I thought it would. But we are now really in the throes of, |
| 1:35:29 | Will Marshall | so if it wasn’t for the AI revolution, people would be like, whoa, there’s a big space revolution happening. I mean, some people obviously track it, but on the scale of the globe, And my point most of it was that these two things are colliding, the space revolution and the AI revolution, because they’re natural partners. |
| 1:35:51 | Ashlee Vance | Well, it’s all very dramatic. And if, like you said, I mean, if we hadn’t been putting more modern computing into space and on some of these systems, we wouldn’t even be able to get there. And I always think you guys, I just don’t think it’s like unreasonable to say I don’t even know, this definitely doesn’t, |
| 1:36:09 | Ashlee Vance | SpaceX gets a lot of credit for a lot of things, but I think you guys were the ones that had this vision of pushing modern electronics and computing into space and really changing what we could do in low earth orbit. And I don’t know, obviously I care because I did all this stuff, |
| 1:36:26 | Ashlee Vance | but sometimes I think you guys don’t get the credit. You kind of deserve writ large for what is just like a monumentally dramatic shift |
| 1:36:37 | Will Marshall | which we still haven’t seen the full implications of. Well, thank you for drawing attention to it. I appreciate you seeing that. |
| 1:36:44 | Ashlee Vance | I try. I try. Will Marshall, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. No worries. Thanks, Will. core memory podcast is hosted by me ashley vance it is produced by david nicholson and me our theme song is by james mercer and john sortland and the show is edited |
| 1:37:08 | Ashlee Vance | by the john sortland thanks as always to brex ventures for making this possible please visit our Substack youtube and podcast channels to get more of what core memory makes thanks y’all |