Off-Nominal - 131 - AAA for Science

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Dr. Tanya Harrison to talk about the Earth and Planetary Institute of Canada that she—along with very-recent guest, Dr. Gordon Osinski!—founded and announced just a few weeks back.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 131 - AAA for Science (with Dr. Tanya Harrison) - YouTubeEarth and Planetary Institute of CanadaFollow TanyaHome - Dr. Tanya HarrisonFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey, everybody. We were really struggling to get that started there. Jake was making faces. I missed the button two times, but the one person on this stream that is on it is Tony Harrison. How's it going? Good.

How are you guys? We're holding it together here, you know? Yeah, we're getting through a very difficult time in doing our jobs here today. It's not like you've done it before, right? No, no. I know. We had it in this whole other component where we do like, a little pre-live stream in the Discord.

But we had some good content in there today. We were debating Virgin Galactic and New Shepherd. You can hear my controversial takes about Blue Origin in there, which everybody loves. Everyone loves my Blue Origin takes. It's funny because they're the non-controversial ones, but... I got to get on the Discord. I'm missing out of this.

I mean, you could probably coax it out of Jake on this show. Yeah, it's pretty boring. I'll tell you that much. My take is pretty boring. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're going to talk about planetary science. This is the third episode in a row, Anthony, where I have taken over the show to do planetary science episodes.

And that's what happens when you get rid of your planetary science podcasts. You just find other outlets for it. So that's how that goes. But yeah, so you've got some cool stuff happening, Tanya. We're going to dig into that. And I don't know, just generally kind of what's going on. I'm sure we'll have some interesting tangents, but do we want to start with drinks? What do we want to, who wants to go first?

You're on vacation. Okay, all right. At least that's what you told me. So, yeah, I am. Kind of. I'm in Menzineo today in Mexico and I found that there's new craft beer available. So I bought one. I haven't seen this before, but this is wild.

Check this label out. Okay. What is happening? So this is the Amigo. Amigos Cervesa. I don't really know how to say that. Amigos Cervasel. Wow. Oh, my Lord.

Look at the detail on this. Okay. I want you to see. Like, there's some good stuff. Yeah. Wow. Oh, gosh. The more you look at it, the more jumps out.

Right. I love the hat, like the top there. Yeah. And then the belt buckle is pretty wild. Obviously. Yeah. It's pretty intense. I love that you were like, that's the one I need.

That I'm like, this is the one that means to go on. I know like a vast, vast, vast majority of people that our audience are listening to this, but this is the one time I would say just pop into the three minute and 30 second mark on the stream. Exactly. You need to see this bottle. This label is pretty wild. No details. No spoilers.

Wow. All right. I brought some stick wine, Jake. It's been a long couple of weeks here. And I've got a couple bottles of that to work through. Stick one. That's the go to. Tanya.

I think you're in a transient situation at the moment, as we're talking right before we went live. So I hope you have a drink of some sort. Is there a water bottle nearby? Is everything okay with the white wall behind you? Are you in Johnny I's house? Are you wherever they record Apple videos? I don't know. Yeah, what's going on in there?

I was in Montreal last week, and I was at a place that had a bunch of different space-themed wines. And now I'm regretting not buying any of them because I just didn't want to haul them back on the train. So it is actually very cold and snowing here in Ottawa right now. So I walked to the nearest grocery store. I was like, there's got to be something space themed. There was not. So instead, I got this like pineapple coconut cabucha so that I could pretend that it's a pinia colada and pretend that it is not like negative three in snowing. More of a mindset kind of acquisition there than anything.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm with you in spirit, Jake. I'm sure it's much more down there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anytime I talk to other Canadians now about the weather back home, I'm just like, nope, no, no, don't miss that. No, I don't need that in my life.

I'm happy. I'm not a part of that anymore. I got the AC on. It's good. Oh, man. I'm literally sitting like, I don't know, like a meter from a space heater. That sounds far. That, that, da, that.

No, that's just an imperial measure. Measurement joke. Imperial measurement joke. Yeah. Real good. Loved it. High glass joke. What are you doing here? Epic. Well, yeah. So, Tanya, I mean, big reason we wanted to have you on is that you've started this new thing. And I just like don't know a lot about it. And we haven't had a chance to catch up about it. So I was like, let's catch up in public and do it that way. No pressure. So yeah, maybe we'll just open it up. So Epic Earth and Planetary Institute of Canada. What the heck are you up to these days? What's going on? So I see you had Gordon Zinski on a couple of weeks ago.

So Gordon Zinski was my PhD supervisor back in the day. And we decided to team up and launch this new institute to try and help create more jobs for Canadian PhD scientists that are being generated in Earth and Planetary-related fields because Canada is a powerhouse in these areas. If you look at a bunch of different rankings for things like space sciences, climate action, forestry, like just a ton of things related to Earth and Planetary Science, you have multiple Canadian universities in like the top five, the top 100, like depending on the category you're in. And the government invests a lot of money in generating these people through fellowship programs, covering tuition at the provincial and the national level.

And then a lot of those people end up having to leave Canada to get jobs if they don't want to go work in like oil or mining in these fields specifically. There have been some studies where both the University of British Columbia and University of Toronto tracked their PhD grabs over like a 15 year period, basically stalking them all through LinkedIn and trying to see where they ended out career-wise. And they found that only 20% 20% of their PhD grads, I think specifically in STEM fields, had full-time academic positions, and 40% of those people had to leave Canada to get them.

And so this is a problem that needs to be addressed. We could even see it in the group of students that have graduated from Oz just at Western. Pretty much all of his students ended up leaving the country to get work. Or they did, and now finally many years later, a couple of them have managed to get jobs back in Canada. But the options are just really limited up here for non-academic research-related rules in Earth and Planetary Science.

In the States, you have a lot more options. You could work at a NASA Center. You could work at a national lab. There's a few soft money research institutes like Southwest Research Institute and Planetary Science Institute. But there wasn't really something like that up here. What does that mean? What does that mean? Oh, sorry.

In academic speak, it's basically you have a job but no guaranteed salary. So, yeah, you have to write all your own grants and then hopefully you get funding that there. I get it. Yeah. It's not a great, I mean, if you're really good at writing grants, it's a great way to have ultimate flexibility in your career. But the problem is you could be an amazing scientist and still not getting any grants funded because the funding rates are so low these days. I mean, not even these days. Historically, the rates have been very low.

So, yeah, we wanted to make an option for people to stay in research in these fields, in Canada, retain more of that space talent, especially as there's about to be this huge expansion in what Canada's doing in space. We've got Jeremy Hansen going to the moon with Artemis II next year. We've got the first Canadian interplanetary mission, the lunar rover that's coming up no earlier than 2026. We'll see when that launch date actually ends up being, but 2026 feels really ambitious. Um, there's a bunch of stuff planned in the earth observation side of things.

There's something called wildfire sat coming up, which is a collaboration between multiple government agencies in Canada. Um, looking at 2030s, there's an Arctic observation mission that's planned and, you know, hopefully some of the Arctic is still left by the time the 2020, sorry, the 2030s are here. Um, so there's all this stuff with government. That's true. Yeah. Well, it'll still be from. you want to look at, you know. Yeah. You're like a water base kind of person, then I'm at it. Yeah. New jobs for ocean.

Yeah, huge. Huge ocean market. Just don't know if we're going to have to bring a space heater or an air conditioner when you go. That's the only thing is not really clear right now. Yeah. But yeah, there's been huge investments in the Canadian government side on the engineering and the industry for all of this stuff. But not as much investment in scientific research. And so we want to try to change that through epic and through work, just like through discussions with the government, through collaborations with industry, to try to bolster that and say, you know, it doesn't do any good to send a rover all the way to the moon if you don't have scientists on the other end working with the data. And we should be working to keep those scientists in Canada.

Yeah. I remember I was talking to a while ago I did like an interview with Tim Gowge about this exact same. just like talking about, you know, because he's Canadian and he's down in the States and doing all this great work on Mars. And it's like, you know, there's there's all this, this talent that we have up in Canada. But from a funding, like, you know, everyone complains about like research funding in the U.S. and like there's obviously opportunities to make it better and whatever. But like from an absolute dollars amount, like there's just like a ton of money down there compared to what we have in Canada. Right. And so like it's like obvious. Like yeah, that's where and people end up

going. But like, yeah, I feel like we could do. such a better job of because it's like a pipeline right so like you you like train these people and they get all these skills and then they do research and then they learn things and then the things we learn provide some value back to like society right that's kind of like that's like the science that's what we do it for like you want to just learn stuff to get make make our lives better and those like last couple steps always seem to get outsourced away from Canada and I want us to like take credit for the whole the whole thing right to the end I want to get the credit for the thing at the end. That should be like a Canadian thing, not just done by a

Canadian through whatever, University of Arizona or something, right? Yeah, it's kind of like how all the best actors in Hollywood end up being Canadian, right? Like, you've got all these superstar Canadians working on NASA missions, which it's great. But like, let's make more opportunities for people to do that in Canada so they don't have to leave. I ran a survey for this earlier this year, too, to be like, hey, if you work in these fields and you had to leave Canada to get a job, would you have preferred to stay if you could have? And 78% of the survey respondents said they would have preferred to stay in Canada. So people want to stay.

They want the job opportunities. We just have to make them for them. Yeah. It feels like it's kind of a perennial Canadian problem, though. Like it's not just a science thing. Like you're from Hollywood for sure. That's exactly one. So I'm from Alberta, and I remember like a longstanding issue.

I think it's a little bit better now. but a long-standing issue was like we would suck all this oil out of the ground and then we would like send it to Texas and they'd turn into jet fuel and sell it back to us like you know like weird stuff like that or it's like why can't we make the jet fuel and just have it like I don't know why we can't do the refinery part or whatever right so it seems to be a very common theme with Canada yeah for sure I'm inexperienced this place in this kind of thing because I'm from New Jersey where you don't leave everyone loves living in New Jersey and stay there forever it's like you're I am. Absolutely no one can use to Manhattan for work from New Jersey, right? Well, I mean, that counts, though. It's the living where you're at. You know. Yeah. Maybe my half of the state is like this. The other half of the state I don't speak for. No one on your half of the state can use to Philadelphia, right? Yeah, no. Not at all. Okay. All right. Without turning this into a dunk on New Jersey.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right. I'll, all right. I'm just, I'm going. Well, all right. I'm just, I'm just, I'm I just want to hear some tactics and strategies because this is probably something that is not Canada specific, like, in the world, right? I'm sure this is the case in other places as well. Canada has a high-level expertise. Certainly, Dr. Oz was enlightening us as to, like, all the amazing things that he and teams are working on. But there's likely other areas in the world that have similar situations going on. So can you enlighten the entire world on a good strategy to do to make, progress in that direction so that they can

institute it elsewhere. No pressure there. I'm just trying to give you some offshoots. Please make a TED talk on the spot. Listen, the last C is Canada. So the other three letters, you know, you can really just tack on whatever you want on the end of it, is all I'm saying. Yeah, we'll just change the little logo at the end of there.

Just switch out the letter. Different, you're going to struggle to find an icon as cool as the Maple Leaf, but, you know, we'll figure it out. It'll be okay. I know whales could be pretty sweet for a little dragon in there. Wow. You cute? First I thought you meant just like a whale.

Then I realized you meant like the country. Sorry, I'm Welsh. I'm very biased. But then we could keep the acronym epic because the Welsh word for whales is common, which is spelled as the seat. There you go. All my Welsh friends. Like let's let's start the satellite campus.

Just need a new top level domain. Epic research. Wales or whatever. What's theirs? Dot something. Dot whales. To whales. is it?

It's probably got a TLD. It's probably .C0.U. It is. Hold on. It's dot Wales. It's dot Wales. Are you serious? Or is CYMRU?

Is that what you're talking about? Is that the Welsh? Yeah, that's a lotcher for Wales. It's either one. Yes. Dot Wales. I'm buying epic research. dot Wales.

I'll transfer to you when you're ready for it. I'll sell it to you for like $10,000. No, no. I'll just give a kid. now somebody that's watching this is going to go buy it and like ruin all these plans please don't do that they're going to buy dot w h a l-e-es though the wrong one everyone's just like what are you talking about listen then the sea can stand for cetacea just to keep a topical ryan reynolds can help you buyback dot whales if if that happens i want ryan reynolds to invest in

epic come on you got to love space like let's make I don't know about Ryan Reynolds. We could get Rob McElheny there, no problem. Just give me a long afternoon over an Eagles game and we're there. There you go. Anyway, strategies. Let's talk about strategies. What's your game plan?

So there's basically like three approaches that we're trying to take to try and make something where the funding is more secure than just not, you know, giving somebody a job, but they don't actually have a salary because they see. still have to write grants for it. One avenue is talking to different government agencies, so not just the space agency, but earth relevant agencies as well. So natural resources Canada, environment, climate change, Canada, agri-food and agritaget Canada, anything where using remote sensing data in this case is like

our initial focus could want to make use of an agile group of scientists to tackle problems that they might be facing. So, you know, universities are really good for fundamental research, less good at doing things very quickly. I say it's like having worked in universities and in the industry side, you know, there's pros and cons to all of them. So trying to get sort of a happy medium in between there, like an institute that can work doing scientific research,

but doing things at the pace that industry or government might need, as opposed to focusing on fundamental R&D, which is something that is better in a university space. Another avenue is working directly with companies that might need help with science. Earlier this year, when I was kind of debating what my next career move was going to be, I reached out to a few different companies looking for jobs. And I got responses from a lot of smaller companies that said, oh, we'd really love to have you or a scientist on staff,

but we don't have the head count for that. So having an institute where you have a bunch of skilled PhD scientists, on hand, you could access those for the same cost or maybe less than hiring one scientist to be on your staff. And especially for younger companies that maybe needs some help proving out the use cases of their data, really getting that grounded in the science so that they can say, for sure, yes, our data is capable of doing XYZ or our equipment can do XYZ. We can help with that. And again, doing that at the pace of industry. And then you have philanthropy, which that does get involved with universities. I mean, there are donors that give money to universities all the

time. But in general, it tends to be a space that individual academics don't have a lot of visibility into. It's not really a space that I was familiar with at all before working at Planet. And then seeing that there were a lot of these philanthropists and NGO groups and stuff that were getting funding to work on these sorts of things. So we're trying to take that approach as well to see, are there philanthropists that might want to invest in agile science, probably predominantly on the Earth's side? So that's why the Earth part of Epic is very important. But you never know. There might be a wealthy benefactor who's like really interested in studying the moon. Like people, rich people do weird things with their money, you know?

Some of them build rockets. Maybe some of them will want to launch a research institute. So we've many different threads going. Yeah. Again, if you're a rich billionaire, give me a call. Yeah, totally. Yeah. We have some ideas for you. One of these cool missions is on the scale of a mega yacht. So it's only a matter of time until somebody's like, I want to, you know, one of these weird missions instead of a mega yacht. That's just a matter of time. Yeah. In my eyes. Yeah. Exactly. Science is so much cheaper than that. I mean, the rocket Venus one is like a nice yacht, not even a mega yacht. We should just list all the missions in terms of number of yachts that they cost. Yeah,

what kind of yacht? It's like an 80-footer. Add the cart, 1.2 yachts. Yeah, yacht-based. Yacht-based economy, yeah. That's going to make it into like an independent review board. This is actually the equivalent of 500 yachts, so clearly we really missed the mark on Mars sample return here. Oh, no. How many mega yachts?

Oh, God, please not that many mega yachts. The mega yacht sales report. So this is like science as a service. then basically like really what what you're kind of setting up here right so um would your plan be to like hire people like on staff at your organization and then just sell that out as a service like or would you be more like be like a broker where you're connecting people on contracts kind of thing like how do you imagine that looking now these would be people that are employed at epic so really at the end of the day like we want to make jobs for people so there's uh in terms of i can tell you

you worked in tech by using the term science as a service. That's exactly the way I've been thinking of it. Having just worked at a company that was, you know, like data as a, data as a server's software and service kind of thing. So a difference between that and say being a scientist at university means you probably don't get the opportunity necessarily in every role to focus on like one particular research topic. You might have to be a little bit more of a generalist.

So somebody that's just really good at geospatial software at large. or analyzing Earth data sets over different topic areas or different geographical regions. So you still get to do research. You're doing something that is very impactful to the world, but maybe you're not setting yourself up to be hyper-specialized in, you know, one particular type of rock on the moon, for example, unless that's something where your interest happens to align with an area that the government or a company is funding research on.

So that's another way that it's kind of differentiated from being at a university. Like there are so many scientists that want to have jobs where they're doing something that they feel is meaningful and impactful and not evil. And so giving them an opportunity to do that, even if it is not necessarily something where they're setting themselves up to be like a prestigious academic at the end of the day. Like there's a different, there's another path they can go down if they want that. we want this new path to be available to them for the people that don't want to go down that pathway, or they've tried and it hasn't worked out for them just because there's just not enough jobs in academia for all the people that are coming out of these programs. Well, and I feel like you could fill a whole episode talking about this, but I kind of,

I kind of have this impression that the prestige of academia, as you kind of labeled it, is like losing a bit of its luster these days. I mean, I'm sure it's great to get your PhD and then get tenure track and be, you know, like a prolific name in the industry. But like, I feel like that that draw is not the same in 2023 as it was in 2003 or 1983 or 1963. Like, you know, like just that that is not the only path that scientists can take. And it's not necessarily the best one because like that path like kind of sucks. Like the journey to that place, it kind of sucks. It's not really a fun time a lot of the time.

And so maybe this is less of a crazy idea that it maybe sounds at first is what I'm trying to say. I mean, I think even, say, five years ago, something like this wouldn't necessarily work in the Canadian ecosystem. But because there's so much stuff in the pipeline related to Earth and Planetary Science, I think now is the time for something like this where it can be. successful. And a lot of it previously was kind of like you said, there's way more money flying around in the research space in the United States compared to Canada. And some of that is just orders

of magnitude, right? Canada is geographically very large, but the population, I think, is still smaller from the state of California at this point. So there's not as much tax money flying around to be able to fund these things. And, you know, that's something where I think Canada needs to, I shouldn't say it needs to. It's the best way to word that. Like, We have to accept that we will never be the U.S. Like, we're never going to be able to do stuff in space at the level of NASA. So what could we do with Canadian level budgets, with the advances in technology, with the lower cost of access to space, the lower cost of space tech in general?

Like, it's opened up so many doors that wouldn't have been possible for Canada to do. But now you can look at countries like India sending entire missions to the moon and Mars for, you know, I think when you convert it to Canadian dollars, it's around 100 million. dollars that's a lot of money yeah it's like one yacht just uh get one of the canadian billionaires to sell a yacht sell them we'll give you a mars orbiter in return that's a solid proposition boom we'll name it after you like whatever you want as long as you're not too problematic it'll deorbit by man yeah yeah huh the decay date is sooner than the cancellation date you're in good shape

I feel like that, like you said, you know, even five years ago, and I feel like one thing that really stands out is a big opportunity is just like, because data has become so ubiquitous, like, not ubiquitous, just cheap and available, right? Like, especially Earth observation data is, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of it. And you would know this coming from planet, but like, yeah, tell Tonya why there's so many pictures of Earth. Yeah, yeah, it's freaking your fault. But if there's like all this data out there and it's like, it's amazing, you know, you know,

a farmer can go and sign up for planet and get a picture of their land every day for, and they could look at that. But like, that's a lot of data to like parse. And if you don't have data analysis skills and like the ability to like look at that scientifically and learn things from it with like rigorous confidence, like that, the data is not really that useful, right? Like, so like I feel like there's that huge middle ground. And I don't know if planets, maybe planets going after this as well by offering

interpretation services on their own data. Maybe that seems like a smart thing for them to do. But either way. I was talking about that now. And I don't feel like it's been, I don't know if it's been pulled off behind the scenes well, but I feel like everyone is just talking about the fact that they are working on that thing and not necessarily like here is our killer app with it. It's just been a hard nut to crack because there's such niche needs across every industry.

And then within those industry. industries. So a lot of talk has been around that it's hard to have a blanket solution for everything or like one app to rule them all. And so people tend to go after these kind of consulting outlets instead because they're like, I need this very specific piece of information from this massive data set. But I don't know how to use it because, you know, me as a business person at this company or like me as a software developer has no experience in working with geospatial data. And certainly I don't know how to parse millions of scenes over an area, like help me figure out what to do with this and just make

something that will give me the information I need at the end of the day. Yeah, yeah. I mean, to torture the SaaS metaphor even more, like, you know, planet could theoretically be kind of like a Salesforce situation where they have this like really like, you know, deep core product. And then you have all this like ecosystem of like Salesforce integrators, right? These are like little consulting firms that will pair a business up with Salesforce and do that sort of connection.

piece for you. And they're closer to the business, right? They're closer. They're in, there can be in your region or your market and you're in your business even. They can be in your sector and do kind of like that work for you, right? There's also the value in being people that know what data is available or exists or is being captured. Because keeping up at that, I mean, like, we have trouble keeping up with the space news generally, but keeping up with details of what constellations are being launched now, what kind of data are they capturing? Is it accessible? Is it really expensive? And is this one that's not the one you want, right?

Yeah, we're like, is this one that's a little bit worse in terms of resolution, but way cheaper, that's going to do just fine for you. And that kind of expertise of guiding people of like, this data exists and it's useful to you, and here's how you make sense of it, is something that is not, like,

it's not probably obvious to the business owners or the institutions that could make use of it. So, you know, having experts come and say like, yeah, this is, we've a what you care about in the world, and these are the things that you could tap into, that alone as a service is really valuable, even if they were then to go off and buy it themselves and do their own work. Just helping understand the satellite industry and the remote sensing

industry is like a full-time job in its own right. So, yeah, you're convincing us in public, as Jake's initial outset was to you. Well, there's so many problems that could be addressed using Earth observation data of any type. But a lot of them are in fields where people might not even think that that type of data could help them because people are just like, oh, that's the kind of data I would use for geology and agriculture and weather monitoring. You know, the things that would obviously come to people. And so, yeah.

So I think it's not just a matter of like the remote sensing experts sit off over here by themselves and figure out like what could we do for other people. But another really important piece of the puzzle that I want to address with Epic is getting scientists to talk to these people in other areas. Like, hey, tell us what problems you have. We're not going to come in and try to say we have the solution to your problem. Tell us what your problems are. Let's work together and figure out, is there something that we could be using data like this for to help you? And then work together to create those solutions because there's just so much of a legacy in a bad way of science.

doing science for the sake of publishing a bunch of papers that get stuck behind paywalls, and a handful of people will ever read them unless you happen to write a paper that is particularly impactful. Right, right. That doesn't help anybody at the end of the day. And again, a lot of scientists want to be doing something that helps the world. They're not necessarily just in this for the esoteric goal of, I want my H index to be as high as it could possibly be, or like I just really want to publish in nature. I mean, a lot of them do really want to publish in nature, but like, I assume most people go into science because they want to help the world.

And so I want to help create pathways to link them with the groups they need to be talking to to actually do that. At the end of the day, the scientists are not the ones that are implementing this on the ground. It's the local communities. It's NGOs that know how to get this stuff done. It's local policymakers, local politicians, the people that can actually take action on that. But those people, in a lot of cases, don't know how to get access to. to the data to get this information, even if they did, they might not know where to start.

And so figuring out what their problems are and then working backward from there makes it the most efficient pathway for everybody. And then hopefully you're actually having a real impact at the end of the day. Can I ask that planet related thing? Just as an anecdote, I feel like, because a lot of times you hear about uses of data

and you're like, oh yeah, that's super obvious, but you would never have, you would never think of any particular thing. And there's that, I think it's probably Steve Jervitson, who's always talking about this example on stage of, like, taking pictures of parking lots of various businesses to sense how well they're doing. Yeah. And you're like, that's the most obvious thing in the world. But you would never think to, like, figure that one out.

Like, is that actually a thing that people are doing with it? And who was the first person that was like, what if we sold this data to X, Y, or Z? I'll say Z because it's Z2 on the show. Do you know any of the background there? And is that kind of use case, like, just sounds cool on a conference stage? Or is that a thing that's actually out there in the world? I know that people talk about it a lot as a selling point.

I don't know if anybody ever actually used it in a way that was meaningful. Certainly, we could visualize things like during the COVID lockdowns. It was a really dramatic decrease in, like, a planet had some cool pictures of, like, no cars in the parking lots at Disney World or, like, completely empty views of the Bay Bridge. But I don't think that in terms of like the, oh, you know, we can count cars in the parking lot or our competitors to figure out like when people are shopping

where. I don't actually know if anybody has used it for that case. Granted, my role there was to only track like scientific publications. So if companies worked on that kind of thing, they might have used it and I just wasn't aware of it. But, well, I mean, also, if it's working out for them, they're probably not going to tell anyone about it.

You know, like that's true. Yeah. I mean, if you had a way to take a picture of every Walmart parking lot in the United States every day and then throw it into a model and the day before the quarterly results are reported, you just take a look at it and then you buy or you sell. I mean, there's some things you can do there. There's your new software. And then you could expand that and put in some target in there and then you can look at

the whole industry. You could do some stuff there. But that doesn't, I don't know. Can I take pictures of the internet? That's the question, Jake. I don't know if that's the kind of meaningful work you're looking for, Donnie. Yeah, no, no, that's not at all. Yeah, no, my point was just that, like, these things get talked about so much,

and they are incredibly obvious when you hear about them, but you would never just glancingly think of them if you're a normal human in the world. Counting avocados in the bin, isn't that the other one that they always talk about, right? With salads? Those are some freaking good satellites. Those are great. Yeah, you can see, like, the level of, like, the storage bins for avocados to see, like, Oh, like major huge...

I don't know. I think that's more like oil tanks. Yeah, you can do it with oil drums. You can see like the shadow of where the cap is like floating on the oil. So you can guess from that like, oh, we know what the volume of these things are. So there must be X amount of oil in them. That's definitely something that like governments look at all the time. And I assume oil companies like looking at their competitors, but I can't say for sure.

Yeah. What if a cargo ship got stuck in a. canal. Is that something you can use this data for, hypothetically? Just counting all the ships that back up as a result, definitely doable. That was a fun week. That was a fun week. Yeah.

Not for everyone, but for us it was. It was great week for planet. Huge week for planet. Like, yes, something visible from space that's a major conversation in the world. Like, let's do it. Yeah, every head line with the planet water. It happens more often than you would expect. Yeah, it turns out all those things are visible from space when your cameras get good enough, though.

You know. Yeah. Or when you're imaging everywhere all the time. Yeah. It's a good combo. Yeah, yeah. So are there any, I want to ask, like, are there particular sectors or, like, areas where you think there's the biggest opportunity in Canada? Like, you know, is it some sort of commercial thing?

Is it, you know, climate change? mitigation stuff? Is it just any kind of peer research thing? Is there, I don't know what it looks like if there's like, I mean, you're a startup, so you've got to like target yourself, right? So I kind of want to know what you're targeting first. Like what's the lowest hanging fruit in terms of who you'd go after as a customer? I mean, right now we're mostly talking to the space agency just because that's where

Oz and I have the strongest ties. Oz is the PI of the upcoming Lunar Rover that Canada is launching. So I'm about to get involved with that in a couple of weeks as well, which is exciting. I've never really done much on the moon other than I looked at some things that people tried to call gullies back at the day. I was like, y'all these are not gullies. Oh, my God, what are you doing? That's the extent of my moon research. So now I get to learn more about the South Pole of the Moon.

Got to change my Twitter handle or something or whatever the heck it is now. I don't know. It's such a dumpster fire. But I think in terms of agile science, that's where the earth step is really beneficial. You know, looking at things like while the wildfires are happening, can you be doing things like fuel modeling to see how it's going to evolve like immediately? And what types of vegetation are burning and what is that telling you about how it's going to spread? looking at like real-time impacts of climate change and how is that impacting communities in a way where you can take action quickly. You know, again, some of that stuff can fall under areas of like fundamental research or long-term research, but some of it, like the fires this year obviously were really bad. Like is there anything more that we could have been doing on the research side to try to mitigate that more quickly?

Whereas if you have something that comes up unexpectedly or, you know, something that was worse than expected, like the fires, and you want to create a research program around that, the time it would take to create a new program, like funding program, create the announcement of opportunity, release that, people write the proposals, they submit them, they get reviewed, and then the money gets out the door, you're probably past the next fire season. And so what are the things like that that you can go after where if you just kind of have some folks on call to say, hey, we need you to look at this, like that's a big, big area. And then separate. from the ad joggle part.

You're literally the scientists on the phone in every sci-fi movie. Like that's the goal. Yes, there you go. Call the science team. Get them on. They're like, we're here. And it's especially relevant when we start looking at space-related stuff, like things that fall under the Canadian Space Agency,

because they're very different from NASA in that they don't really do science themselves. They're more of a facilitator of distributing funds. they work on policy, but they don't really, like there are no CSA research centers across Canada like you have in the U.S. There aren't really any scientists that work there doing science. The scientists that work there tend to be people working on the policy side. They're enabling programs to be created to fund science externally. And so can we help in a way there where it's sort of supplementing what the agency could be doing if they had scientists, but they don't have the capacity to hire those people on directly.

And there's sort of similar arrangements at different government agencies where they can hire a certain number of scientists or they can hire scientists for a certain contract period. But then you either have other people that are just kind of floating around waiting for a job or people that their contract has ended and what do they do now. Could this be a holding tank for those people? So they still have a research job.

They've still got the chops working with the data, you know, staying in the field. And then maybe if government does need to hire those people later, they want to bring someone back that was on a contract before, it'd be like, oh, yeah, we know they're parked over there. They've still been doing this work. They know what they're doing. I got a picture of their car in the burglar lot from the planet satellite.

I know that they worked here all year. We've been tracking that. I can tell you how long they worked here based on that. Here's the picture from their first day. There's their car. Well, we have no parking lot since we're entirely virtual. So at least for now. And this was intentional because,

We want to make jobs for people anywhere in Canada. So the idea is, you know, not everybody can or wants to relocate to a place like Vancouver or Toronto. Like the cost of living is just crazy. Maybe you have a family so you can't relocate. Maybe you're taking care of aging parents. Maybe you just like don't want to live in a giant city. Those are all. Science happens everywhere.

The downside of that whole, that whole like academic track. That's a downside of it, right? Because you've got to go to where the damn university is, right? So yeah, you follow the jobs and it means that there's not a lot of security. You're moving around all the time and it's exciting when you're younger. I'm not going to lie. I was like, oh, I get to move to like X place. And once you start to get closer to 40, you're like, this is just exhausting.

Like you look at your friends that got jobs in industry and you're like, oh, you make how much money? Wait, you have a retirement fund. You have stock options. What like what is that? They've been trading on that Walmart stock in the in the 401 game. Yeah, the first time I moved to a new city, I was like, this is cool. And every other time after that is like, I'm never moving again. Yeah, I'm like, why do I own stuff?

Like, I'm moving costs so much money. Like, I don't want anything anymore. I'm traveling just out of like literally a marsh printed suitcase. I would show it if it wasn't just like open on the floor and a backpack. And I'm like, this is actually so liberating. Like, what does all that rest of my stuff just sitting in storage? Like, what did I need that for? Yeah, yeah.

Can you enlighten me about the Canadian Space Agency, though, real quick, the non-Canadian on the podcast here? You were talking about how they don't have research centers and they're not really employing a lot of these scientists directly. Is that a by design thing because of the budgetary scale of CSA? Or do you feel like it's just hasn't progressed to that point yet and the natural resting places it will eventually? the answer is actually really depressing there were scientists at cSA and a few prime ministers ago

Canada had like their version of trump who basically destroyed science like there were literally like government researchers like had to throw things away in dumpsters and there there was like covert efforts to try to get people to like come and you know steal the records that they would still exist and like basically the whole space agency got decimated in terms of scientists and like from what I was told the building that science was conducted in was just demolished. That's very dramatic. Yeah, it's Netflix special way to add. Yeah.

It was a big deal. Yeah. Like things haven't quite recovered. I was this? Was I completely tuned out or was I just not into Canadian space at the moment? Was this like 10 years, 10, 10, 12 years ago somewhere around there? Yeah. Yeah.

Because what, Trudeau? Late 20 times. When did Trudeau get elected? 15. Okay, so yeah, pre-2015. So it was the dark era. But things have turned around. Yeah. Things have turned around in like some agencies.

Like the environment Canada, which is kind of like the Canadian equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency, they actually changed their name to environment and climate change Canada to very specifically call out. Like we believe in climate change as a country. It is real. like when you watch the CBC, the National, which is like the evening news across the country, they often very specifically say like human-induced climate change. So the attitude around stuff like that has come a long way since the dark era of Harper administration. There's got to be a name for this event on Wikipedia.

Is there? If not, we got an event one. Yeah, there's got to be a dramatic title for this. I'll send you some CBC articles. Because it sounds epic. Yeah, it sounds like that it should be. named event in like the Canadian science history. Yeah. Yeah. No, it wasn't. Yeah.

There was like a whole gag order thing too. Like like scientists who were on federal payroll were like not allowed to talk about their research like unless it was like filtered through the controlling agency or whatever. So like, you know, like journalists suddenly had no access to like federally funded scientists. It was it was not pretty. It was not good. So yeah. Epic sounds great then. Like that sounds like it's what's got to. happen, yeah. Hopefully it doesn't happen again. No, it's cool though. I mean, I like the, back to my question, you know, which sectors are you targeted? That's kind of cool to think of it, not so much from a sector perspective, but more from an urgency thing, like almost like a temporal

aspect. Like, you know, what is the rapid response science that we need and is not available under the existing institutional setup, right? Like, you just, you're right. Like, maybe there is, maybe that talent already is in Canada, but they just literally cannot operate in that kind of environment, right? Like, they just can't operate at that speed. And so feeling that niche first is probably a nice way to sort of get your feet on the ground, right? Yeah, that's the hope at least.

You know, I'm a very Star Trek kind of person. I want to, like, have everybody collaborating working together for the betterment of humanity. And then, you know, I very quickly learned when I became a scientist, like my first job out of school when I was like 21 discovered didn't actually operate that way, which was really depressing. But that meant like I wanted to make something where we wouldn't be like actively in competition with existing structures for the most part because like you don't you don't need to do that. You know, like it annoys me how many people enter the space industry and then just try to start another rocket company.

And it's like, bro, you don't have the money. It could be with Elon Musk. Like I'm sorry, even if your technology is great, like we probably don't need another rocket company. but you're really smart. So maybe work on something that will address a gap that we actually have in the sector. And so that was part of the goal here. It's like, I mean, yeah, we could just create new jobs or like more jobs for researchers doing exactly the same thing that they could be doing a university, but they're doing it outside of university. But that's really uncreative.

And I think that's a really old way of operating. Like we should be thinking more about how we can do science tactically. How can you take it and implement things on the ground? How can you work with people that need the results? How can you be doing things that actually matter at the end of the day? And that's not to say that the fundamental R&D side of things doesn't matter. It certainly does. And there will always be a place for that because you need that as the basis for everything else to build on top of.

But universities are already really good at that. And same thing on the tech side. Like Canada's really good at space tech. Like they are the ones to go to for robotic arms. Canada is the one to go to for radar technology. You know, there's a few niche areas that we've really carved out. And so, you know, you don't necessarily need another group to work on that. But for all these new companies that are growing in Canada, there's like the playing field is getting big very quickly.

I mean, big for Canada, not big compared to the U.S. But, you know, are there ways that we can help them innovate more quickly, like really make sure that their data is solid, help them connect with the right people they need to be having conversations with us to actually make sure that the stuff they're working on on the tech side has, you know, real world applications that matter at the end of the day as well. Yeah, yeah. I can imagine like thinking about climate change, getting data on the sun and the wind in any particular place to try and figure out where to start building more windmills

and more solar farms and things could be, you know, that's a, I mean, I don't know, maybe solar, solar companies are like building their own talent pipeline for that because that's their core job. But like, you know, for a startup or even for like, even for like communities, like, you know, like if some tiny like, you know, if swift current Saskatchewans, like we want to have a solar farm. Where should we put one? Like, where should we be zoning this stuff? Like that's a great thing for them to kind of like outsource to you for, you know, trying to learn some of that. I need to know one thing like for this budget cycle and I need to know it now. like that's that kind of seems like it fits your niche. Get on the phone. Pick the red phone up.

Yeah. And maybe you've got a scientist who lives there who really wants to help their local community. Yeah. Like, hey, let's chat. Yeah. You know, if you can get to a big enough scale where you can actually offer that, like you contract us and we deploy like regional people in your community.

Like that's actually kind of long thing. For refree municipalities and stuff, that's a pretty big deal. It's like AAA, but for, That would be cool. Like, we'll be out in an hour. We'll be out with like our little uniforms, like science response crew on the back. Can that be your new thing? Whenever you have to, if you're going anywhere for like additional funding, just do like

the AAA for science as your, as your tagline there. You call us, you send someone out. They have a cool truck. It's great. We'll pick you up. I'll add that alongside the like science as a service tagline. Uber for science. Science is a service.

Like if you just pepper these in the document, I think someone will. send you some money at some point. Dot AI, if you got epicresearch.com. A.I. Like, you are cooking with gas at that point. Screw the dot whales domain. Get the dot AI. You'll get like 10x funding.

No problem. Wait, but on that note, so, all right, people are out there listening. They're like, this sounds rad. I love Canada. I'm here in Canada. I either need a scientist or I want to be one of these scientists.

Are you looking for either one of those individuals at the moment? Are you acquiring the team of scientists first and then going out to see who you want to work with. What's your, you know, what kind of people do you need to be in touch with at the moment? I mean, anybody that's interested in chatting on how to collaborate on an industry side, so if you work for a company that might want to work with us for science consulting needs, definitely reach out. If you're a scientist interested in becoming part of Epic down the line,

we're not currently hiring just because we're still in the fundraising stage, but eventually we will be looking for people. And so the needs that we'll need to fill are going to depend on what the government priorities are for those funding pockets and what the industry priorities are. But, you know, I always feel like it's never too early to start having conversations because networking is so important. And you want to have that person in your mind when the opportunity comes up. So you can be paying them later and be like, hey, I know you maybe you got a job in the interim, but if not, or if you're still interested in doing this, like, do you want to come and work with us? And you don't have to move anywhere. You can stay wherever you are.

Yeah. Well, I mean, there's definitely got to be some scientists out there that, like, don't just want to work for you. That maybe they want to get on the ground floor, too. So you can never have too many co-founders, Tanya. I've learned this by watching a lot of space companies. If there's anybody with a lot of experience on the actual business side of things, like I feel like I could use somebody that works on that side with even more experience than I've had. working like in industry for the last few years.

So we've got like Oz has really great academic and government expertise. And then you have like me kind of in the middle of the spectrum of like academic and industry expertise. And then I feel like the last missing gap is like industry and business, but like kind of understands how science works and how scientists operate. So definitely like going through my mental roll at X of Canadian friends. But hey, if that's something that you do and you're interested, like, I get, feel free to reach out.

I feel like I know a Canadian guy who's done a lot of business in his life and like science a lot. And so weird, it might be connected to a lot of space people. He else just coined like this. Has time for projects. Jake, join the science of projects. This is the science Avengers. This is your chance.

Epic Avengers. This is the, this is a science Avengers for sure. I can operationalize your movement. That's about the extent of my. he's there. I can fire your bad scientists. That's what I'm really good. You're an expert at corporate reorgs.

Oh, man. Done a lot of them, man. Yeah, I've done a lot of them. So, all right, okay, cool. Hopefully we don't end up too many of those.

No, no. We don't need any more science purges in Canada, apparently. That's apparently one has happened and that was enough. Oh, man, yeah. Now, I was to say,

this sounds awesome. This sounds really cool. I mean, I liked it when I first read it. And then now you've talked me about it an hour. I'm like, oh, this is actually, this is really, really required. I didn't realize how important this niche was because like I had kind of thought about some of these ideas. You know, like, how do you interpret the data or whatever like that? I think I always kind of just assumed someone was already working on it and it wasn't really that big a deal.

But maybe I'm wrong about that. And this is good. Nailed it. I'm glad after an hour. you're not like, oh man, 180. I don't know what you were thinking. Yeah, we're going to talk to we got 32 minutes into this show and we're like, we got to hang up right now. We end this show early.

Oh, man. Do I appearing? Yeah, we're here. Are you here? And both of you lagged out. Yeah, everyone, you're frozen in faces, but not an audio. This is turning into a podcast. Yeah, I can hear all of you.

I don't know what happened. Okay. It's a good podcast. Yeah. Uh-huh. We're back. We're back. Oh, there we're back.

A minor hiccup. All right. Call the science. Now it's so we grab the science phone and ask what's going on in the internet right now. Pick it up. Yes. Hello. Hello.

Hello. What's the skivy? So the website is epicresearch.a. There's not a ton there yet, but at least gives you some information about kind of the different focus areas and the mission behind what we're trying to accomplish and some contact info if you want to reach out to us.

Don't really have a big social media presence yet. What with the tumultuousness of Twitter? Who even knows if it's worth being there anymore? But we'll see. So in the meantime, go to the website. I'll probably try to set up a newsletter. People can subscribe to you soon just to keep dab on what's happening and what the opportunities are coming up

and just kind of general what's going on in Canada in these fields. Cool. And you can find me anywhere as Tanya of Mars, of course. You're everywhere. Soon to be the moon. Awesome. Oh, shoot. Yeah.

You can have to sort that one out. Tanya of planets. I like Tanya of Moon. Tanya of Moon. I'm just covered all moons at that point, just in case, you know, someday I'm like, Enceladus. That's like my next target. Titan.

Come on, Titan's the best moon. Yeah. Change my mind. This is completely, well, it's related to Mars. I did bring a fun party trick for you both at well and the viewers if you care to see it. Yeah, I mean, you said the question. You want me to go full screen on you? What's going on here?

I don't even know what they do at this point. You can leave it part screen just because like it's messy over. here. So I got this tattoo over the summer. You can see it. It's like matching with my sister. Trying to get it on the screen. Yeah, you got it a little higher, a little up. There we go. So my sister has like a matching cat, but it's in a little dinosaur costume. So this is an alien cat. And the girl found out I was a Mars scientist. So she was like, do you want me to do a little Mars tattoo? And I said, sure. But her specialty is UV reactive tattoos. So now I carry this UV flashlight with me all the time so that I can like

show people that it glows if you shine a light on there? So she put those in? I'll have to add those. Just some gullies in there. But like it's like fluorescent. I love that you have a UV light like you're like a bounce

right of like glove or something. The tattoo isn't the story here. The story is now you have to carry around a flashlight for the rest of your life. I legit bought it for that purpose. And now I'm like, okay, I got to go back to her and add like more. UV on it.

But I could show up your tattoo and find out of anyone's idea is fake. It's great. Like, it's a whole, it's great. And it's like vaguely scientifically accurate because the Martian atmosphere like kind glows in the UV in like Maven data. So there's like it's science education now permanently embedded in my skin. Or I guess UV reactive ink fades away in like six to seven years according to Google. So it's temporarily embedded my skin.

According to Google, we'll find out in the half life of UV embedded. stuff. I'll be back in seven years with my flashlight. We'll see. Get that real good. By then, you'll just be rated part of the iPhone, so it'll be,

you don't have to carry around anything special. I heard one time you can inject it right into your bloodstream. I heard that one time from some guy. So that is apparently an American reference that did not make its way to your feeds when President Donald Trump one time said we could just inject the light directly into our bodies. Oh, right.

along with bleach, right? Yeah, yeah. It was a direct injection. I brought up a full circle for you, Jake. Got up for that guy right there. I just brought a full circle, yeah. Yeah, once in future President Trump. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, boy. Yep. Yeah, I'm really excited for his speech when Artemis three lines on the moon. It's going to be awesome. Yeah, that's a hopeful timeline, Jake. That's a tight window of time that you just put out there for us. So, 2028. Yep.

Wow. Be sticking to it. All right. What else are we doing on this podcast, Jake? What are we doing here? Just to really bring people back. Yeah, really just to spice it up at the end here. Yeah, so next week.

Our next week may cancel on us after this whole year. We'll find out. We have a really exciting one next week. So we are talking with Tom Muller from Impulse Space. So very prolific guy in the rocket engine world. And now he's doing Mars stuff. So he's like doubly fun and cool. to me. That's pretty awesome.

So we're going to talk about all the stuff he's working on and check it out. I don't know where that's going to go. We're going to have some fun with that one. It should be good. Yeah, I don't know what we're going to get into, but he's definitely been on our list of people we should have on the show someday. So it's going to be great. I'm pumped.

Stay tuned for that. Stay tuned. What else we have to? We had something else to talk about? No? Well, I would just say, yeah, like, if you want to support the show, you know, come over to the Discord. We have a lot of fun there. We have lots of great debates and everyone's going to rip on me for my new new Shepard Ticks in perpetuity. That's going to be fun. So you can come

and join the fun on that. You get to be part of the pre-show now too. So we do 45 minutes before this in Discord only for the exclusive subscribers and we well it's a little more unfiltered and a little more fun. We can kind of kind of do whatever we want there because we're not broadcasting on YouTube. So if you want to come to be a part of that, we focus group takes in the pre-show just to see how they just try them on for a minute, work them out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so if you want to be the focus group,

often on dot com slash discords, as little as five bucks a month, so it helps us do this. Yeah. As much as $25 a month if you want to never fly ride share. Tanya, would you ever fly ride share question for you? I feel like this is a loaded question. It's a little bit of a chat. I need to go to Discord. You forgot the story here.

No, no, this one. Do you measure your rocket prices in yachts or dollars? Oh, man. All right. We've kept Tanya, like, stuck in this basement for too long. So we're going to get out here. You're the best, Tanya. Thanks, Tanya.

You guys are. It's always great to see you. See you later, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye.