information is power data is the new oil it’s the thing that’s going to power all [Music] industries we’re building a system that makes Humanity able to smartly manage resources a bit like the IE system with the visual cortex helps humans make smart decisions it’s art inspiring and it’s important for people to understand what’s coming so I think of it as awareness to action that’s the phase change that we’re going from and action requires detailed tools and information that’s timely and relevant to your day-to-day life and just like the Mainframe computer to desktop Revolution it’s going to change the whole dynamics of what’s possible in space and this is just the beginning everybody Peter here welcome to moonshots I’m here with a dear friend uh may I say an old dear friend uh we’ve been friends for over a couple of decades Dr will Marshall will good to see you buddy great to be on yeah no so listen you are you’ve got a massive
[00:01:01] moonshot uh and it really you know when I think of you I think about raster scanning the planet it’s about being able to know anything I want any time I want anywhere I want and really uh understanding the vibrancy the problems the opportunities globally uh so let’s begin with uh a quick overview of what is planet labs and then I want to get into what is your 10 20 30y year vision for Planet Labs because it’s audacious and it truly is a moonshot yeah well certainly look planet in short is company we have uh 200 satellites that image the entire land mass of the Earth every day so it’s a bit like if you go into Google and click on the satellite imagery layer um except that image is typically a few years old we’ve got today um and yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before basically 2005 500 images now on
[00:02:01] on average for every point of the land mass of the Earth documenting immense change going on and powering AI tools to sit on top that enable us to take smarter care of the planet um resources upon it um but in many ways we started as a space company now we’re a data company and that’s the cool thing that’s going on now space companies it’s less about the Rockets than the satellites and more and more about the data and how it can totally transform the Earth economy and that’s that’s the sort of exciting phase where and I and I guess you know as a public company now it’s the company’s name is planet it used to be Planet Labs back in the early days so I’ll refer to as Planet uh and it’s amazing you know we’re going to talk about the stories of how you went from literally a phone satellite to now 200 satellites I think the largest Imaging private Imaging collection of satellites Maybe maybe the nro has more I don’t
[00:03:01] know maybe they use yours who knows you got more than the nro and more than the government’s yeah amazing uh that’s awesome uh and uh an incredible journey I mean buying satellites from Google uh getting Eric Schmidt Larry Page and Sergey Bren the entire group there and Steve jinon one of the most incredible Venture capitalists in the field to back you as a 20-some year old so I want to tell all that story uh and and really the UPS the downs and The Audacity Of The moonshot you’ve not only planned but built but I want to go someplace else first because I’ve heard you describe this and it’s and it’s awe inspiring and it’s important for people to understand what’s coming what is you know 10 years from now 20 years from now what’s your vision of what planet is doing and what’s possible for for Humanity with the Tech that you’re building well look
[00:04:01] it’s a big question but I really think that we have the tools at our disposal now to manage the planet in a very different way um you we’ve got a lot of challenges of climate change and we can talk about and biodiversity loss and all these things but more broadly we’re on a spaceship hurtling around the Sun and we were taking data of it once a month once a year and how the heck are you managing that it’s a bit like you know um um I think we were having a conversation with our grandchildren like then they’ll say hey how did you manage the planet before you measured it regularly of course the answer was not very well you know um and and and and you obviously can’t be a smart um actor without data I mean in in as a space geek I’ll tell you a little space story you know that when you put satellites into space you obviously try to measure them faster than the time scale they change like if they’re spinning around once a minute you better
[00:05:02] measure that spin faster than once a minute like if you take a data point once a minute you ain’t going to stop the spin right you need to measure it faster we are all on the spaceship eight billion uh astronauts um hurtling around the Sun and you know we have impact on that planet on days and weeks time scale of human activity how do we manage that if we’re not taking uh information if we’re not taking data points on that sort of time scale so it’s a it’s stands to reason that you can’t um help the planet without that sort of data you as they like to say you can’t manage what you don’t measure so the vision in many ways is to give everyone the tools that Ena us to make smart day-to-day decisions based on the physical understanding of what’s going on the planet um I actually you know did a TED Talk which extended it just beyond just the imagery of the earth it’s the AI on top that then enables you to sort of have aerial Earth um this is in uh
[00:06:01] 2018 and you know in modern pons it’ll be like Planet GPT you know what is it the you should just be like you you can text search the internet and text now in in in in human readable form if you’re lying what’s going on and it give you human readable answers you should be able to do that for the Earth how many trees are there being cut down in the Amazon where where are those trees what’s the plot versus time what’s happening in my neighborhood who’s doing what why where where is the how are the parks doing what how do they need help what do we need to do to clear up the pollution why is where’s the pollution come from you know all these challenges um humans should be able to have that at their fingertips and without having to have a PhD in um space satellite imagery processing in order to get that right just like um we are doing again so you know AI companies have fig out how to
[00:07:00] turn the text of the internet first into a searchable place that was Google and now into this human readable way of interacting I love Planet GPT it’s a fantastic it’s a fantastic term uh you should put that out there more uh so I love the idea that at any time you can query what’s going on on the surface of the Earth um and get an answer and and do it at a variety of spectral information and resolutions so you have 200 satellites today roughly yes um what do you you know if you were you’re setting your you’re a moonshot entrepreneur you know a decade from now or two decades from now what do you imagine to create Planet GPT where you’ve got information at a regular basis at you know high resolution what do you what do you want to where do
[00:08:01] you want to get to what’s your vision well I on the data side I think we’re going to and the satellite piece we’re going to get more and more accurate data so higher resolution smaller pixel side yeah what’s the resolution today uh well our daily scan is at 3 met resolution our highest resolution imagery is at 50 cm so we have a sleet of 20 satellites that can zoom in anywhere and actually it’s kind of fun to think of it like how the human High Works which is you have peripheral vision in much of your visual field you only have high resolution in a tiny bit in the center um and um and actually it’s black and white Beyond a certain point in your peripheral um but you’re very good at change detection and if there’s something changes your visual cortex goes hey guys uh get that high res over here and then you turn your eyes to your head right so we have the scan which looks at the whole peripheral at 3 meter resolution the whole planet and then we have the high rares that can zoom in on any particular piece that changes so we call that system phobia a bit like the inspired by the I um uh and
[00:09:01] the visual cortex is of course the AI that looks at the scan finds the changes finds what’s interesting in the changes blocks out everything else and then coordinates what we should do as a result of that including taking higher resolution imagery but also making decisions day-to-day right oh that’s a threat this is just a cloud you know no big deal um and and so think of it that way I I I think we’re we’re we’re we’re building a system that makes Humanity able to smartly manage resources is a bit like the eye system at with the visual cortex helps humans make smart decisions do you remember calling me during covid one night really excited I think I just had a power outage in the home and you’re on the phone giving me your your vision of where I guess now calling it Planet GPT where it was going um and I was just it was the most compelling Vision I’ve heard about both giving our children the tools
[00:10:00] to manage the planet but it’s also a multi-trillion Dollar business opportunity can you dive in a little bit more so so do you think we’ll have thousands of satellites do you think we’ll have higher resolution yeah I think I think it will get more and more real time and higher resolution so maybe you know we’ll get definitely get submeter daily scan uh but I think we’ll get more like hourly maybe less um um we’ll also have other spectral bands so we talk about going up in space faal resolution temporal resolution so how frequently and spectral resolution how many spectral bands and that less useful for the human eye but it’s a absolute field day for the algorithms because they can use different colors to distinguish between things I mean even down to I mean we’re just about the launch some high spectral satellites that have 400 spectral pans that enable us literally you can tell not just that it’s a green car it’s a green car that comes from this Factory over here because that’s the only Factory that produces that shade of green you know you can also look you can also look at
[00:11:01] what the oil reserves are of a country by virtue of the thermal heating of the oil tanks because Well you certainly level do the levels of the tanks we can even do that today I mean but I even like I mean one of the most wicked problems of the earth is where is all the life what different forms are where we can actually tell species type of the the trees or the grasses or the coals underneath the sea down to you know a certain depth and so on all automatically and so this and this is a field day as I said for for AI because it can pull out all of these things right and and help us understand again the planet so it’s it’s we’re both trekkies and so when the Starship Enterprise you know sort of goes into orbit around the planet and uh and Captain Kirk uh you know tells Spock to scan the planet and he says we got these many life forms here I mean that’s basically what you’re enabling totally yeah totally now I mean talk about the idea
[00:12:00] of uh what industries and businesses this enables so can I can I just paint the picture one second so uh thousands of satellites yes yeah I think that’s right yeah thousands of satellites with each satellite has how many sensors on it yeah a few I mean this doesn’t need to be many I mean it’s mainly through one telescope but different spectral regions yeah and all of this is being fed into to a data layer that’s being able to is constantly being analyzed by AI y right I mean so this is about early detection of disasters it’s about early detection of opportunities it’s about Discovery it’s science it’s definitely industry it’s hedge funds managing hedge funds it’s everything I mean go go give me an understanding of how big this opportunity is and how does it change the way we do business today because
[00:13:01] it’s massive well I mean information is power I mean The Economist said data is the new oil it’s the thing that’s going to power all the industries by the way when a little fun fact if you look at all the tech Giants and what they’re doing with AI they’re all open sourcing the AI code they’re all open sourcing exactly zero of the data because the asset that they have That’s Unique is always the data not the algorithms or less the algorithms than the data and that’s why this you know so when you think of AI where where to invest in an AI company who’s got the interesting data because that’s going to be where you feel so data is the new oil it Powers all the industries hopefully it’s not dirty light oil but it is analysus in the sense that it it Powers all these different industry oil Powers all these different Industries data is going to power all those Industries as well if you’re in transportation it’s going to make more efficient Transportation if you’re in agriculture it’s going to make more efficient agriculture if you’re in government it’s going to make more efficient government if you’re in you know you just Race Across all the things yes hedge funds Insurance you know and I
[00:14:01] could give get more concrete let me give you a couple of specific examples um I think of the world as you know broadly undergoing three Transformations today one is digital transformation that’s the transition of Industries to help them uh digitize bring their systems into uh on into information World such that they can then be more efficient um the second is sustainability and we’ve got to transition to have a sustainable economy that doesn’t blow up the boundaries of the planet uh it obviously does so in a way that we don’t further heat the planet and so on um and the third is we’ve got to do all of that with having good peace and security um geopolitically and what we need for all three of those factors is transparency and accountability of what goes on so everyone needs to know and understand their supply chains for supply chain risk for security for um uh uh um sustainability but let yeah let me get a little bit
[00:15:01] more concrete digital transformation take agriculture we image every farmer field on the Earth every day that’s um roughly a quarter of the land mass of the planet is agricultural land every single Farmer’s field we can tell in each three by3 box what crop is it is it corn wheat soil how well is it doing what practices the farmer used um and what they should do next whether they should add water the soil is too dry we can actually tell the soil moisture level um is the crop in need of uh fertilizer herbicide or not are they putting too much so that it’s law causing runoff that you could then save uh in total we think that we can improve crop yield by at least 20% and decrease use of fertilizer and other things and other inputs by 20% as well a 40% in increase to efficiency over a trillion dollar sector that’s a big deal I could go through industry industry on digital transformation then there’s sustainability transformation um here we
[00:16:01] need to you know help us ourselves to manage the plan I’ll give you an example from just last year um Brazil we do a a weekly um image of a scan for New Roads Road starts in the Brazilian Amazon the whole Brazilian Amazon once per week and if we find a new road it’s a sign of early sign of either illegal deforestation because they put in these logging roads before they then get a treat or or illegal narcotics or illegal um um um mining we provide these day these weekly alerts to the federal Min the federal police in Brazil they go out they sent last year 3,000 Expeditions based on our alerts that where they they and they in total reduced deforestation in Brazil by 55% in one year on the back of this system and They confiscated $2 billion
[00:17:00] worth of assets I hope you got a commission on that well we kind of did yeah I mean that was hard sale um it wasn’t actually done that like that but I mean there’s great Roi um and so that’s sustainability transformation and then peace and security is where we help countries like what’s happening in Ukraine right now we are we did a building damage assessment across all of Ukraine helping everyone downem what’s it going to cost to rebuild we did an assessment of where the crops and how well the crops are doing for food security for country and also for the world because it’s a bread basket for the world we did an assessment of how the Russians are stealing grain where they’re taking it to you know there’s all this stuff that we can help operationally and in certain broader humanitarian sets and finally also in terms of hearts and Minds um every time uh Russia says oh we don’t bomb civilian targets we have shared with the New York Times where they bomb civilian targets that last you know the shop schools and the hospitals it’s accountability that we can share this because it’s not a classified system owned by the nro you
[00:18:02] know we can share that data um with news media where it’s appropriate to share light on what’s going on and hold those actors accountable this is transparency equals accountability and so um these are the three sort of major areas we can help in a couple of specific examp I I love that I speak about the fact that that people behave differently when they’re being watched that you know you put a camera in front of the dictator and the cam the the Ator changes their behavior you put you drones over poachers uh going after aneros and the poachers go away and so this is complete and total um transparency and forced accountability I remember you speaking about a vision of the future of like uh brand new layers of googleable data or or you know Gable or CH gtable data weable I think I said what queriable yeah we’re we’re a school kid can can literally um can go and and
[00:19:06] discover whatever they want can you can you speak a little bit about that information layer on top of the planet and what that means yeah I mean I think that’s right um the way I Bly think about it actually and you taken it more into the sort of Consciousness realm I mean when humans went to the moon and looked back and saw uh the Earth we helped uplevel human Spirit to say hey we’re on a planet is fragile it made to a phase change in human consciousness the in layer of atmosphere protecting us from the vacuum of space the coldness of space that’s you know it was daunting but it helped sort of give birth to the green movement I think we’re on the verge of different things we’ve got a big mirror to look ourselves in the face that that that that webcam is is it’s more of a mirror and back to ourselves right and with that we it’s about we’re already aware that we’re on a planet
[00:20:01] that now it’s enabling us to take smarter action because everyone can see everything right it’s so I think of it as awareness to action that’s the phase change that we’re going from and action requires detailed tools and information that’s that’s timely and relevant to your day-to-day life anyway you know going going to your to your journey um for for a child look think about the exploration that can be done on this planet but I love sci-fi like you do you’re talking about Star Trek but s reality is [ __ ] amazing excuse right you know I get too I get I barely get time for sci-fi because there’s so many scif facts that I just get boggled by right the Earth is full of those you look around our planet is constantly changing I look at our imagery every day and you see Rivers changing you see um people harvest things you see boats move you see all this stuff happening the Earth is dynamic we have this F impression the Earth is a static place because we were
[00:21:01] used to maths whether it’s online or physical that’s not how the world works the Earth is dynamic what an exploration go go go go pile in everyone it’s Peter in a few weeks I’m gathering an incredible group of AI leaders including Ray Kur Eric Schmidt Mustafa saliman Imad mustak Michael saor and others at my private abundance Summit to discuss the impact of AI on our lives our businesses and the world the abundance Summit is a private Community open to extraordinary moonshot entrepreneurs its Singularity University’s highest level program and it’s not for everyone if you’re at the top of your game and you want to learn more about this program click on the link below to be considered okay let’s go back to the episode enjoy for everybody listening uh will is an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur an exponential entrepreneur and we met each other uh in the space Community uh got
[00:22:01] what was the what were the space gen conferences it was yeah and I mean I think we met in 1999 in that Vienna conference and then 2001 200 2000 2001 2002 I don’t know we we definitely met in I think 1999 was when we met 25 years ago yeah pretty ancient at this time I don’t know I still feel like a kid uh and you’re and you’re still playing with toys so but they’re world changing toys and I want to dive into the journey right I I keep keep on reminding people that you know these moonshots that entrepreneurs are taking um are not overnight successes they’re typically overnight successes after 10 11 years of hard work exactly um and and uh I want to go back to your story I’d like you to share the story the ups and the downs and those pivotal moments um and just to put some numbers on it uh planet was founded Circa 2010 I think and then you went public in
[00:23:01] 2021 so you can go and find planet planets on the top of my ticker list on my phone you can go find Planet on on the NASDAQ and uh it’s now 2024 so uh it’s been a 14-year Journey from startup to today and amazing what you built but let’s go back uh so you and I met each other uh again back on the campus of of NASA a at Singularity University um and what was that what was that formative moment like for you and your co-founders yeah I mean look the the thing that had happened was that um my colleague at Nasa had kept on holding up his phone this is a uh the early smartphone in 2000 was was it was it a Google Google phone I don’t know and in his specific case I don’t know um but he would say look this has got most of what a satellite has if you think about what’s in a phone it’s got cameras it’s got GPS it’s got rate Gyros it’s got
[00:24:02] accelerometers It’s got processors radio I mean it’s just crazy all the stuff then it’s stuffed in here and it cost 500 500 bucks or a th000 bucks meanwhile NASA is building these huge satellites they also have roughly the same list of things but they cost 500 million bucks or a billion bucks and the quick thing we were like what are those extra six zeros doing for us and I’m not saying they not nothing no one was saying it’s nothing it’s it’s lower risk it’s bigger you know telescope it’s uh better sensor but it’s kind of remarkable how much stuff is fitting into this little box and we wanted to leverage that you NASA was very much in the mindset of inventing everything for itself because you know what it had to sending man to the Moon well we didn’t have computers so we had to invent microm computers we didn’t have you know solar panels so we invent solar panel you know all that we have to build everything from scratch well guess
[00:25:00] what the top R&D dollars aren’t an asso anymore they’re Google Samsung Apple Microsoft all the rest um and so this is learning to follow for the space industry not a comfortable place for the space industry you know we’re used to Leading from the front you know we were a little bit annoyed by this whole idea of having to follow but the fact is that the billions of dollars that have gone into miniaturization of electronics were super useful for space so this is learning to take those stuff them into much smaller satellites much lower cost but have much higher cost performance that is data per unit dollar and you know we estimate that that has changed orders of magnitude because of ours and others efforts I mean at least three orders magnitude and that is a bit like the Mainframe computer to desktop computer Revolution but for space and just like the Mainframe computer to desktop Revolution it’s going to change the whole dynamics of what’s Poss in space and this is just the beginning we’re seeing communication
[00:26:00] satellites and Earth Imaging satellites take off right but there’s going to be others as well better GPS and navigation systems um you’re going to see you know better radar systems better so many things are going to take off because of the fact that you’ve got uh much more capability per dollar um also launch costs have come down about 4X in the same period so that has helped as well although a common misconception I think is that that’s the dominant thing that’s led to this actually it’s kind of the other way around um satellites miniaturizing has enabled us to put much more capability per kilogram that’s going up and that has changed the demand for going up which enabl us to bring the cost down I I would say it’s much more that way around than the other way around we still benefit and they and they they add on to one another but you know the Thousand X in the space industry that’s happened is not to do with the launch it’s to do with the miniaturization and and increasing capabilities performance of satellites per unit dollar per unit kilogram yeah
[00:27:00] exactly yeah the specific performance of satellite has gone through the roots um that phas Chang enables lots of different applications and most of them in the field of some sort of data because your remote it’s all about collecting data or transmitting data and just in the last five years we’ve seen more than a tenfold increase in um amount of data from space and more than a tenfold increase in the amount of data around orbit because of with communication satellites enabling communication one side of the plant to the other that’s a total Revolution that 10x in both of those areas so the upshot of the space Revolution is a data Revolution so but that what there was that moment was it Robbie who was your co-founder at that time Robbie and Chris bous yeah and both great amazing how old were you guys when you were um so we were late 20s um when we started that and and we were like okay so phones they work in let’s put them in a vacuum let’s stick them on the side of a rocket I I remember that conversation I remember you saying we stick this thing in the
[00:28:00] vacuum chamber and see if it still works afterwards yeah we did well it was funny because I mean that’s like going back to the womb for these guys because actually they all the electronics are made in a vacuum you know that’s what people don’t appreciate and they’re made like I mean little like brick [ __ ] houses these things you can drop them they still work they fall out of airplanes they Landes I mean they’re kind of robust so we start it on the side of Rocket it also still work we eventually put three into into into orbit um I almost got fired by uh Pete uh Warden because I hadn’t really got all the things in a row um to to do that I didn’t know that we were doing this and kind of freaked out when they found out but we were like no that’s uh this is going to be cool we’re going to show that consumer electronics can work in space and that can change the whole um whole clost equ equation here so yeah we launched three phones into space they worked they they were tumbling around so I want you to back up a second so you have the idea uh you and Robbie and
[00:29:01] Chris uh start was it Planet Labs at the beginning yeah well no this this phone project was at Nasa this this was an internal NASA project internal NASA Government funding just to see and by the way yeah I mean yeah sto stolen work hours if you would nights and weekends um and so you send up three and it works they work and then they’re tumbling around taking pictures we got yeah people with yaggy antennas all around the world picking up the packets because we don’t have ground stations they send us the packets we reconfig these pictures and like okay we take pictures from space for a few thousand dollars not a few bazillion dollars so okay this is kind of interesting um H maybe we should leave NASA and do something like this I mean the cameras on this wasn’t the right kind of images it was more proof of principle it’s a proof of principle that this technology could work in space so then yeah we left NASA to start planet um actually it’s initially called kogia name a few years in um and um we we
[00:30:03] launched uh then so where where did you go first was it was uh was Steve your first investor then yeah so he was and we started building and launching our satellite uh first satellite we put the deposit down on a rocket with our own pocket money which rocket was that huh there was an antaris rocket and we two one on Anar one on our sawy uh would be popular these days we’re not meant to use the Russians um but then we could and we did and um so we put the deposit down but there was no way we were going to afford the main cost of the launch and and so we were like oh [ __ ] we need to get some money that was when I was reminded because one of the times we were launching one of these phone sets it was in the Nevada Black Rock Desert right where they Burning Man and when there’s not burning man there’s sometimes rocket uh amate rocketeers go up there and launch things into uh space because there’s a there’s a very high um airace so they can do that and of course
[00:31:01] there’s no one around um and they um so we were up there and and Steve was helping us to put our rocket together or something I didn’t know who he was but he blogged about what we did the next day and that was when Pete found out about our Pham set project and almost fired me because he was like I just read you guys are putting phones in space and we’re like okay calm down it’s going to be fine uh for those who don’t know Pete Warden was was the head of NASA Ames he was a general in the Air Force he was uh part of the Strategic Defense Initiative back in the 80s under Reagan a dear a co-conspirator in the in the entire space flight Revolution and a dear friend he us and and because I’m a bit of a peaceloving hippie that I prefer peace in space not SDI in space I think I won because he was working at Nasa he says he won because I work for him something about that anyway but yeah uh Robbie Chris and I said at this point
[00:32:01] let’s spin this out as a company we took our core spacecraft team we replaced everyone at Nasa first because we wanted to do good by the by NASA and and we took our coure team Steve kindly um having routed us out we went to him and said come on you got to give us some money for this and he was like okay you got just you guys are just crazy enough I’ve only done one space investment before he just a year or two earlier invested in SpaceX first money SpaceX Steve Jetson one of most brilliant um Venture capitalists on the board of SpaceX had been on the board of Tesla um and has the most magnificent space Collectibles collection of Russian and NASA components and hardware and meteorites and everything yeah he’s great how much did you get in the first round you remember oh that was um yeah three million C then he led also the a which is another 12 million I want to say um and um but
[00:33:02] that also had some participation from other people so did the seed um he led the first two and then the B was led by Yuri Milner 50 million put in or he put in 30 of 50 or something um and then um the C round was Data Collective and international Finance Corporation and a bunch of others and then the round was essentially instigated because we bought the satellite arm of Google Google then became soow slow it down so during that second it’s the nature satellite uh so you know in that window time this is the 2010 to 20161 18 time frame uh both of us were close friends with uh with Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt were you were on the campus there of of NASA Ames which is where Google keeps their airplanes that and I had singular University there and talk about about sort of the first time you connected with uh with the Google guys
[00:34:02] and started talking about orbiting satellites and things like that yeah I mean well it was a little bit random um in 2006 or seven when I first got to ases I like hiking on the weekends and I hiked from my house where we started planet and did the first satellite in the garage to the Sea which turns out to be quite a high and I hadn’t really exactly planned it out with my girlfriend at the time about 80 km 50 mile hik um today um from there to the Sea so basically over the mountains to Big Basin and then down to the Sea um by the time we got there there was no um there was only one bus a day and it had left we just missed it cell phones didn’t work there because we’re in middle of nowhere so we get to this beach and we’re like damn uh how exactly are we going to get out of here and my girlfriend was basically divorcing me at this point so that’s a bit a bad plan um anyway so coming down to this beach and I said well I hope these guys are friendly because there’s
[00:35:01] three people on the beach K surfing and um one of them turns out to be a friend of mine called Don monit um who is a wonderful guy and helped to teach Serge and Larry to K Sur and it was the other two people were Sergey and Larry and I I when they came in off their boards I was like oh hi Don great to see you can you give me a lift home and he was like no I’m not going your way but these guys are um I’m in the car with my girlfriend and Sergey and Larry on who are giving me a ride home now and they’re like can you stop can we stop for dinner I was like of course sure there’s let’s stop for dinner and we get chatting and and and my girlfriend’s like what do you guys do and they’re like we we work at Google how they put it and I was like wait a second their name’s Larry and Sergey and they work at Google okay I think I know who this is and and she’s like well what do you do exactly at Google and they’re like well you know set Wars strategy or something I’m kicking on to the table going I think
[00:36:00] these are the guys that started it anyway became friends with those guys um um early on and they got very interested in space and came around to see our Luna Lander to demo to do see some of the um missions that we were uh like the one we slammed the South Pole of moon looking for water they came round for even though it was Landing in the middle of the night 2 or 3:00 a.m. and they came yeah so they were interested in that stuff so they follow this is where sometimes Serendipity and good luck plays a hand yeah so so you start planet and uh uh and Steve invests uh and when do you start sniffing around the fact that Google had satellites well they bought a terabella or Sky Skybox Imaging which became terabella um um I want to say in 2015 um and so they bought that to start a satellite arm and they actually were sniffing around us too time and we we wanted to stay separate and they um
[00:37:02] bought this arm and well we thought it was fine and they were going to do that of course it’s a little bit competitive um Sky Box at that time was was the sub one meter resolution image these are larger much more expensive satellite I was saying of the zoom in because then subsequently Google decided not to continue that investment and spin that out they came and approached us and and um Eric uh who was then an investor um had had suggested that we have a discussion on that and we did and then one thing led to another and we ended up um uh buying their satellite arm not for for cash Google has plenty of cash and we had very little so it made more sense for us to give stock in exchange for those assets and then Google became a shut up hey everyone I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day in fact I use it twice a day it seeds DS1 daily symbiotic hopefully by now you
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[00:39:02] checkout that’s seed.com moonshots and use the code Peter 25 to get your 25% off the first month of seeds daily symbiotic trust me your gut will thank you all right let’s go back to the episode do you still call the smaller satellites dubs yeah I love that and and describe those small satellites yeah they’re about this big uh they weigh about uh five or seven kilograms so you know 10 or 15 pounds um they um they spread their wings out to uh close solar panels they solar panels exactly yeah um and they chirp a little bit from there actually we get data rates of two gigabits a second over a th000 kilometer range from our little radios now that’s amazing what what altitude are you flying at I mean people need to know the lower the altitude the better the resolution the better com rate but the degradation you deade and orbit yeah what’s your
[00:40:00] trade there yeah our trade is we choose about threee life our thinking is that just like you don’t want a three-year-old phone in your pocket you don’t want a three-year-old satellite in space it starts to become Obsolete and just the same actually really every uh uh we we’ve launched on average four time we’ve launched 35 Rockets over 500 satellites um we launch on average four times a year and every time we’re iterating their technology to make it better and better just like every time you buy new phone it’s got the bigger camera better better hard drive whatever we’re doing the same and we call that strapping space to Moors law to make it better and better in that that place of data per dollar you know which is the sort of the the vector we’re trying the metric we’re trying to optimize um so uh we’ve seen a 10,000 fold increase from our first satellite to our satellite today in terms of data per dollar um that’s that’s incredible I mean that is that is Mor’s law um and and are you
[00:41:00] mostly launching on SpaceX these days or SpaceX um we’ve we’ve launched on 35 35 times on 10 different rocket vehicles um but indeed SpaceX and the pslv I think SpaceX has been our most common one of all PV is India right and we’ve launched on other vehicles as well the European Vega the US Atlas others and when you I mean when Starship starts uh I mean you could launch all 200 at once no we could launch like 10,000 at once it’s yeah yeah no it’s crazy I mean you know I do worry about the A380 problem with that like it’s not clear that there’s yet a market for that vehicle it’s not impedance matched with people’s ability to build satellites yet the only satellite Fleet that can fill it up at the minute is really starlink itself but then that doesn’t help uh you know they’re only their own customer you
[00:42:00] know do do you do you feel um I mean it Planet used to have the biggest baddest most satellites on Orit he had the largest satellite Fleet but Elon came over and did more yeah I know it’s kind of annoying they’re bigger satellites and he’s got more of them I it’s I’m pretty outraged by this no it’s good look we’re all obviously trying to do uh things to help the planet and I commend what they have done with Starling it’s and the rockets of course the reusability I was a doubter on that I thought the reusability was too hard and he did it well I mean you and I have both been for the last 25 years Space Cadets and it was always the Holy Grail reasonability I mean it was he pulled it off yeah and he pulled it off yeah we always think of this as Elon of course it’s a huge team and but Elon of course has been an inspiring leader for them to do that you know um this past three years we got Elon to fund a100 million gigaton carbon
[00:43:00] removal X prise um to try and stem the tide of uh of the environmental uh destruction um and you have become an extraordinarily outspoken individual on the environment and I think part of what you’re trying to do with planet is give us the tools to measure the planet in a way that allows us to hold companies individuals dictators nation states responsible for the impact they’re having because despite the borders that exist they don’t prohibit the uh the the free movement of pollutants and and CO2 so talk a little bit about that for so if if if people listening um are not convinced uh or need some persuasion on the the State of Affairs give us your best shot no I mean
[00:44:01] look the the from our um 10,000 foot view or in our case 400 kilometer view we see the whole planet and I see it evolving um the facts are stuck um and humans have obviously um manipulated the planet we’ve got two big problems um the one that everyone knows about and the one that everyone doesn’t the one that everyone knows about is climate um and now we are emitting um too much uh CO2 and it’s warming the planet and obviously we’re having extreme weather events now exactly what the scientists have said it’s the first thing you get is that and um and of course sea level rising whole um nation states being wiped out um the second is um biodiversity loss um and this is where we’re wiping out ecosystems um of life and you might think well why does that matter to humans I mean they’re just off there some whatever some animals in the jungle
[00:45:03] why does it matter for us uh it matters for us because it is estimated that half our economy depends upon what they call nature Services um which is that the the the trees and the soils and the mycelium and the and the plants clean our water and they clean our air and they do all these things and we don’t have the industrial capability to replace that we have no we don’t have the technology um we are fully fully dependent on the rest of life and in the last um 40 years in my lifetime we’ve wiped out 70% of the life on the earth 82% of wild mammals gone in 40 years 75% of fish in freshwater rivers and lakes gone in the last 40 years 70% of insects gone in the last 40 years 70 uh 66% of birds over half the coral reefs over half the for us all gone and we think irretrievably
[00:46:01] gone and we think we can do that without there being consequences for us we are so naive and what is driving that is deforestation overfishing it’s human uh pollutions uh from agriculture into rivers it’s all these sort of things and um that is just a big problem as climate change and they couple of course to make things worse now the the Amazon is not any longer a net CO2 sucker be it because of the climatic events and then that means it’s more likely to fall over as an ecosystem we are dealing with a complicated system humans need to aforest reforest uh a lot of the land we need to stop our over fishing we need to do these things and there’s things humans individuals can do for this right we’ve got to you know uh reduce our um
[00:47:00] um intake of meat which is what drives 70% of deforestation is is for for CS we’ve got to reduce our of course um use of um fossil fuels and those things and we got to there’s things we could do to help as well like helping in our local parks to plant trees to help Rew local parks I’m involved with a project that is just rewilding an area about a thousand hectares um north of here in in San Francisco to try and bring back the the native ecosystems after over usage both Mining and over cattle usage of an area that wiped out most of the natives it’s hard work and I wanted to understand what it takes on the ground um because we’re trying to help people through satellite imagery all over the world to do this conservation effort um but yeah no the situation is is somewhat tragic what I would say is we have Wicked problems and we have Wicked tools to go help them and our aim at planet is to to help provide everyone of those
[00:48:00] tools let me give you an example we are trying to um um switch to a sustainable economy for that we basically have to measure nature and carbon and put it into our economic system at the end of every year every company and every country on the planet is going to need to balance its carbon books just like you balance your finances and just like doing that you of course the first step is measuring where the carbon is whereas it all in your supply chain you you can all do a personal carbon budget you find that flying around is probably the worst bit as I did um but you know you need to balance that budget well how do you offset your carbon of your flights or whatever well you can grow trees you can change transition Farms to sustainable farming practices well how do you know that’s happening when you do that well you need satellite data that can do that uh we just launched just a few weeks ago it’s one of my proudest launches for Planet uh moment moments not a rocket
[00:49:00] launch but a launch of a data product called um Forest carbon planetary variable we are measuring the carbon across the whole Forest of the earth and helping to quantify how much carbon is in the trees and we’re actually doing at 3x3 meter level every quarter and then going back 10 years and that means pretty much each tree we’ll be able to say how much carbon is in the tree why does that that matter well it matters because if we’re going to have carbon markets where Microsoft say says I want to offset my carbon of all my execs flying around and some people in the Amazon say well we’ll plant some trees or stop deforestation in my area somebody need to act as the bridge that says indeed they have done that and how much carbon has increased right you need a carbon economy and we’ve been lacking that um but it all depends on this this core measurement so you make possible an ex prise I’ve wanted to do for a while I’ve wanted to do for lack of a better
[00:50:02] term the trillion trees X prise which is um any team can register and can claim a plot of land where they’re going to plant trees um they’ve got to have permission from the land owner could be a government location and so forth and we measure um and hopefully there are thousands of teams in in 100 100 plus countries around the world and we measure who wins now one wins by getting the most but there’s this massive long tail over the course of a decade um you know I’m a big fan of your your prizes because I think they incentivize Innovation as well as uh much more capital in than the prize givers GE it’s kind of amazing happens um yeah and I think you could even do it by carbon of course you have to restrict it by and there was a mistake a little bit in New Zealand where they they tried to do this based on carbon and then everyone planted pine trees which turned out to be fastest add in carbon but they were not native they hurt a lot of the other
[00:51:00] species and then when the wind blew they all fell down and so you have to do the right kind of trees but yes subject to certain caveats you want to incentivize people to do that also to restore existing Forest you people are taking a few trees out or so yeah we can the idea is to be able to measure that to underpin carbon markets or carbon prices of the kind you were just saying love it will we have a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs people who got Big Ideas uh what I dare call exponential entrepreneurs can you mind sharing some of your Lessons Learned like mean some of the challenges or or problems or like you know what was it that led you to this extraordinary success of of building this um you know and now as a public company CEO and a company frankly that has 100x growth potential as you measure the world it’s huge it’s a data it’s an AI company um that uses satellite technology um but the journey
[00:52:01] could not have been easy what were some of the Lessons Learned what’s the advice you have for entrepreneurs out there well look I think the biggest thing is that it takes time grit and U endurance um they you know a lot of people list all the things that differentiate uh good startups and bad startup the right idea the right timing all these things I’d say by far the biggest one is endurance as you put it to me once and it’s one of the sagest pieces of advice I ever received um and it was to do with your project on the first X prise um the ansarian X prise um you said for eight years no one noticed what you were doing basically no one had even figured it out maybe I remember you showing me a little clip from the LA Times that was like this big on page 40 how proud you were that somebody had you know it was something like that and I was like wow you know Peter’s great
[00:53:02] and then two years later it was FR page of every every headline on the planet yeah and it the exponentials are hard to understand and they you know don’t humans don’t have good intuition for it as you’ve explained many times and so towards the end you get a big effect that you so you could do you know and as the as the Silicon Valley addage goes you you always under what you can do in a year sorry overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do 10 it takes 10 no the sage piece of advice I should say is the thing you said it take because of that experience it takes 10 years to do anything meaningful in the world 10 years yeah you had you had 11 year from come up with the idea until the company went public ex prise was 11 years for me too it’s 10 12 years if you’re tackling a problem that that’s actually going to have serious impact on the world not just a frivolous thing and and and it
[00:54:03] it’s not going to happen any year it’s going to happen intent so wow you know that’s just a reality I think and there huge rewards for it but you have to stick with it and the number of people that told me no was you know I could I can’t even count right I mean no you can’t do it no you can’t have money no there’s no business no there you can’t build those satellites blah blah blah blah blah so you know I had to keep going you know and our team had to weather through that right and that’s a it takes a certain sense of endurance as well as as idea and timing uh and all the rest of it which obviously you need two but um and luck a whole heap of luck right I mean um you know I mentioned the Sergey and Larry thing I mean what the heck right place at the right time like so some of that just one would say luck comes from uh perseverance as well like you stick around long enough totally totally and
[00:55:01] to take risks right and so so yeah nothing ventured nothing gained and all that um so I definitely um would say youve got to stick with it the other thing I would say is tackle something that’s meaningful in the world Life’s Too Short don’t ever start the strategy that looks like this I will do this thing which doesn’t sound that interesting cool Tech but um really the main thing is I’ll get rich and then I’ll be a philanthropist and give the money away such [ __ ] agree it’s ridiculous it’s it vote with your feet do something useful every day don’t wait a few years until you’re rich enough to then do cool stuff do cool stuff with your feet you know there’s you know I gave a talk a stand for took is this so it I I have a basic test for that if you should be able to whatever your idea is you should be able to look at the UN development goals sustainable development goals and check a few that
[00:56:01] that goal that project helps and if you can’t if the answers are null set you should be looking seriously that idea you know and let me be honest like there’s a lot of apps in Silicon Valley Mayon companies no more photo no more photo sharing apps please I yeah exactly what the hell that that may make money and it is perfectly waste of time and I used to think of this as like okay well that’s cool different people do different things and that’s helpful except when you think about all the challenges of the planet we can’t waste lows of the best Engineers this is what gives me pain about a Facebook right now and I don’t mean to pick them out but like I don’t see it’s not clear it’s net positive to the world and again you could say well it doesn’t matter cool stuff cool Tech I’m sure some interesting Tech will come out of it there’s definitely good but there’s definitely bad in terms of ruining uh um information Ecology of the with with you know Echo Chambers and stuff but I think
[00:57:01] it’s much worse than that you are putting 40,000 or whatever it is Engineers who aren’t solving the world’s problems they’re just helping us to share pictures what the [ __ ] I mean there’s people starving on the plan I’m sorry you know just not where we need to be putting our time and resources when we have you know a half a billion people that are undernourished um a climate change challenge biodiversity loss all the problems that we have in the world um so life’s too sure if it doesn’t hit one of the big goals of the planet don’t do it yeah the way I put it is if you want to become a billionaire help a billion people and the world’s biggest problems the world’s biggest business opportunities absolutely absolutely everybody I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that’s very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it’s company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented Physicians you know
[00:58:01] most of us don’t actually know what’s going on inside our body we’re all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I’m sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn’t start that morning it probably was a problem that’s been going on for some time but because we never look we don’t find out so what we built at Fountain life was the world’s most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we’re building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body MRI a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it’s the most advanced workup you’ll ever receive 150 GB of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at
[00:59:01] the very beginning when it’s solvable you’re going to find out eventually might as well find out when you can take action Fountain life also has an entire side of Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain life /er when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for fountainlife memberships if you go to Fountain life.com back/ Peter we’ll put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it’s a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans go to fountainlife decomp it’s one of the most important
[01:00:01] things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let’s go back to our episode you know um I I’ll I’ll close out with uh uh something else we just landed on the moon uh which is fun uh first commercial private commercial vehicle to uh to make it and you and I have been Lites uh for quite some time you were involved with Pete Warden on a few shall we say uh undercover unusual lunar missions Area 51 lunar missions yeah yeah uh to uh to crash into the South Pole and image the lunar poles looking for uh for ice in permanently shadowed areas because ice is the Saudi oil fields of the Moon liquid oxygen and hydrogen you know I just announced um on a podcast I went back with Bill gross um from my deal and we talked about the uh the uh blastoff lunar Mission we had
[01:01:01] worked on for for a number of years and of course Google lunar X prize that you were familiar of we had 26 teams three made attempts and um intive was the fourth team that made an attempt and they pulled it off they stuck The Landing the they stuck it yeah amazing Makes You Makes You Proud now wasn’t quite you know the lunar rover in 1972 bouncing around with humans but uh but just like your phone sat um has evolved uh this the the evolution of what we’ll see especially as Starship gets to the moon is going to be awesome are you still a lunite over a Mars guy oh God yeah yeah it’s not only it’s like a a thousand times easier to put a a settlement on the moon than Mars look I I mean I think we’ve mainly got to pay attention to this planet but I mean the Moon is inspiring to me I think that it’s a place where I I I would love to visit there and look back at the how big the Earth is in the sky four times wider
[01:02:01] than the moon is in our sky and see the continents and um and get that perspective that I think that helps um people to understand our place um I it but but but practically and technically it is just far easier than Mars because the Mars had has the an annoying thing of an atmosphere which for for space Bing species is really annoying right it’s only use if you can actually breathe it which you can’t on Mars if you can’t breathe it then it just makes landing and taking off much harder you still have to wear a space suit you can’t land and take off and the Moon is one and a half or two days or three days travel time whereas Mars is eight months and you can go any day of the week uh which makes a big difference 2.4 second round trip by the speed of light you can have a conversation exactly you can have a conversation whereas you can’t I mean just the difficulty de Delta is orders of magn orders of magnitude I think you know we did this estimate um there’s workshops um where we’re um at as where
[01:03:01] we estimate even with star with with Falcon 9 forget Starship um we and by the way Falcon 9 is perfectly adequate for this you could put a settlement on the moon with that we think would be self- sustaining being able to do its core um things of being able to mend everything that would break that would be life system critical um for a couple of billion dollars what the heck that’s that seems like a reasonable uh why wouldn’t we do that um and I mean I mean it’s it’s something an individual can do right or or Bezos yeah some of our friends could do that and they wouldn’t even noce it disappear from the bank account yeah yeah I mean look again most of our Energy’s got to be on on Tera Fara we’ve got so many challenges but it’s inspiring and um I think um it makes sense at that sort of scale to have a have backup uh plans um uh for Humanity uh so
[01:04:11] yeah yep the same exactly yeah if I can just RI off that the it’s that yeah the the the this is a it’s a tool it’s a that enable but it’s an ecos system for sure there’s no way we can do all the applications as Oney that of how to help use this data to help make smarter decisions or help make
[01:05:01] lives better around the planet there’s just a billion companies um that could be built off the top of this that that uh you know we an application so yeah um AI makes it easier as well so you don’t have to have again a PhD in satellite imagery processing to get to grips with this this is a standard API you say your aoi your area of Interest your time of Interest your toi and then we’ll just give you the data or even we’ll give you analytics feeds like how much carbon is in all the trees or or or where all the ships or whatever and we just give you lat Longs and these things this is getting easier and easier and so uh I I think we’re successful only not only we we can enable that we’re only successful as Planet if we help companies to do that as an ecosystem this is like the app iPhone app store but for Building Solutions to help the planet I was I was to say that y I want thousands of ecopreneurs as Mar Ben likes to say of entrepreneurs that are focused on helping the planet um building off of
[01:06:02] the top of Planet data you know I mean and let me say one other thing look we do have real as I said we’ve got Wicked problems Wicked um Technologies to help solve them um I’m going to disagree with your abundance thing a little bit here we have some of those problems are so acute that I think that we’re going to need Technology Solutions like we able energy and better Data Solutions and we’re going to have to consume less material resources because there’s no that you can get more digital resources but you can’t consume more than we’re presently consuming it’s eating the planet that’s what we’re seeing the mining even if you swap the renewable energy for example the we’re seeing all the mining for lithium for more batteries in the end we also just need to a little less waste less you know we waste 45% of our food um we need to conserve a little bit more on electricity and things that combination is what we’re going to need to get out of here it’s made a smart use of our
[01:07:02] present staff Smart Technologies like renewable energy and smart use of our present staff including at a personal Behavior level we’re going to have to change our Behavior a little bit I I I respect the reduction in waste and I respect the increase in efficiency and uh I think for the first time ever we’ve got the tools to begin to think through that and to do that uh so listen if you’re a moonshot entrepreneur and you’re trying to figure out your next gig what would you do with an incredible information layer on top of the earth uh that is getting deeper and richer and accessible through apis and AI engines I can start imagining a whole slew of different uh startups I’d be doing so maybe it’s a little bit of inspiration um again thank you to you uh will uh to Robbie to Chris for founding Planet uh
[01:08:00] real pleasure to have you as a friend and so proud of what you built thanks a lot Peter it’s been a pleasure to have this conversation with you [Music] today