Something You Should Know - The Psychology of Lying & The Race for Outer Space - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

UPGRADE TO SYSK PREMIUM! To unlock ad-free listening to over 1,000 episodes plus receive exclusive weekly bonus content, go to ⁠⁠⁠ https://SYSKPremium.com⁠ No one likes making a fool of themselves — but it turns out, it might be one of the best things you can do for your happiness. In this opening segment, we explore how moments of public embarrassment can lead to surprising psychological benefits. It may feel awful in the moment, but research says it could actually improve your well-being in the long run. https://exploringyourmind.com/making-fool-yourself-makes-you-happier/⁠ Everyone lies… but at what cost? When you're caught in a lie, the damage goes beyond embarrassment — it can change how others see you and even how you see yourself. In this fascinating conversation, Drew Curtis, licensed psychologist and faculty member at Angelo State University, explains the psychology of lying. He’s author of Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped (https://amzn.to/47PmsmP), and he reveals why we lie, how it affects our lives, and how to spot deception before it fools you. The space race is no longer just between nations — now, it's fueled by billionaires, startups, and high-stakes competition. Ashlee Vance, bestselling author of When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach (https://amzn.to/44gavDB) and feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, joins me to explore how private companies are transforming space exploration. Discover who's really leading the charge — and what’s at stake as space becomes the next frontier for profit. It sounds strange, but the bubbles in your cup of coffee might just give you a hint about the day’s forecast. In this quick and quirky segment, I explain how to read the signs in your coffee — and the science (sort of) behind it. https://www.instructables.com/Predict-weather-with-a-cup-of-coffee/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Keep it classic and cool with long lasting staples from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Whether you want to lose weight, grow thicker, fuller hair, or find relief for anxiety, Hers has you covered. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's code happy me at happy mammoth.com for 15% off your entire first order. Today on something you should know, why making a fool of yourself can actually be a good thing. Then why liars lie, and the fascinating science of lying. People are somewhat hypocritical even with white lies. In relationships, we think it's acceptable to tell white lies to those we're in relationship with, but we don't think it's acceptable for them to do the same to us. Also, how you can predict the weather with your morning cup of coffee. And the privatization of outer space, a lot of companies are pointing rockets to the heavens for profits.

The obvious place where there's lots of money to be had is in low earth, orbit where most of the satellites fly for the last like 10 years, there's been roughly 2,000 satellites around us. We're already up to 10,000. That number is going to go to 100,000 by the end of this decade. All this today on Something You Should Know. Toronto, there's another great city that starts with a tea, Tampa, Florida. Fly to Tampa on Porter Airlines to see why it's so terrific. On your way there, relax with free beer, wine, snacks, free fast-streaming Wi-Fi, and no middle seats.

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experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Hello, welcome to something you should know. Have you ever, well, I'm sure you have been in a situation where you felt embarrassed, humiliated. You know, you come out of the bathroom and there's toilet paper stuck to your shoe or maybe, you know, you're talking to someone and find out later there was spinach between your two front teeth. Well, it turns out that being publicly humiliated like that is apparently good for you.

In one experiment, adults were asked to imagine. imagine themselves in an embarrassing situation, like being naked in the bedroom and discovering that the shades are open, and then rate how they would feel about it. Those who felt humiliated by the situation were more likely to be happy, pro-social, and generous. In another experiment, adults were shown videos of people in embarrassing situations, and those victims of humiliation, who let it show, were rated as much more trustworthy and, likable than those who appeared unashamed. So it seems a little humiliation and embarrassment every once in a while. Build your character. And that is something you should know.

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That's syskpremium.com. Interesting thing, lying. We all know lying is wrong. Yet we all do it. Everybody tells lies, even little white lies, that seemingly don't matter. I mean, if you've told your kid about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, you have engaged in deception, harmless though it may seem.

Some people obviously lie more than others, and other people are habitual liars. They can't seem to stop lying. So why is it we all do something we know is wrong, and what does that say about us? Well, here to offer some really interesting insight into this is Drew Curtis. He is a licensed psychologist in Texas. He's on the faculty of Angelo State University,

and he is author of a book called Big Liars, what psychological science tells us about lying and how you can avoid being duped. Hey, Drew, pleasure to have you on something you should know. Thanks for having me. So if we all know that lying is wrong, why do we do it? There are numerous different motivations for why people lie,

And for psychology, you know, we've looked at a lot of these in our research labs and published on them. And so getting away with something, you know, trying to get out of negative consequence or for impression management, those are some of the major motivations for lying. Dr. Timothy Levine suggests people lie when they, when the truth doesn't work. And I think that's a pretty good reason to understand motivations behind lying. And it does seem to be human nature. I mean, if pretty much everybody does something kind of by definition, that's human nature. That's right. You know, most people lie.

A lot of the developmental psychology research indicates around the age of about two and a half to three is when we see people lying. And most people lie. That's right. And so if you look at lying behaviors, most people have lied in their life. And then it's a smaller group of people that tell lies. lots of lies or the big lies. I've always found it interesting how there, you know, there's these rules, these kind of simple rules that you can supposedly use to tell if someone's lying.

Like if somebody says something and they look up and to the left that somehow that means they're lying. But haven't those things basically been disproven? That's right. That's one of the most popular beliefs, even across cultures across the world. is this idea that gaze aversion is an indicator of deception. And there's a lot of researchers who have shown that eye gaze is not a reliable indicator of deception, meaning, you know, people might look away or specifically up to the left,

and that doesn't really indicate they're lying at all. But surprisingly, that's one of the cues that most people believe even today. And there's shows for this. There's movies, television shows that I think perpetuate this belief. And the other part is we think that we assume that when people are lying, they're probably feeling shamed or guilty. And so they might be looking away from us because they feel that shame or guilt. When kids lie a lot, do they often turn out to be adults who lie a lot? Or is the lying in childhood often just childhood development and it disappears?

A lot of the lying in childhood, it grows. And some of the research has indicated that teenagers lie the most. across the development lifespan, but largely that goes away into early adulthood. And so for most of us, as we become adults, we realize the consequences of lying outweighs the consequences of telling the truth, though we still lie occasionally, often telling white lies. Are there people who lie and they just kind of can't help themselves? Like, there's nothing to gain by it.

It's just that they're so used to lying that, you know, they, just lie because that's kind of their way of life? Absolutely. And those are some of the individuals that I'm real interested in looking at that we find seemingly to be a part of this pathological lying group. One of the things written about is called the Hydra Hypothesis, where essentially lies beget lies. And a lot of individuals who indicate their pathological liars will say that that they'll tell an initial lie, and then the lies grow on top of lies that grow on top of those lies, and it becomes really this bigger beast to manage than it initially was. Yeah, well, that's often one of the arguments for not lying is that when you lie,

then you've got to keep track of what you said and the lies that you said and the lies that you said to support the lie that you're told in the first place, and that's very hard to do, and so why don't you just tell the truth? Yeah, absolutely. And one of the reasons most people, as we develop outside of the teenage years, we realize it takes a lot of cognitive energy if you want to try to get your lies straight. But for some of the pathological liars, it's not so clear that they're trying to keep lies straight is just lying on a whim in the moment. So finding some way impulsively or in the moment to come up with a new lie that justifies whatever position or whatever corner there. in. But also, if pathological liars are backed into a corner, you might say, or really, the evidence

is brought against them, hey, this is a lie and this is contrary to what you said. They do admit, yeah, that's right. I was lying. Are there people, though, who lie and actually believe their lie, that they may have said something, and you know they said something, and then you call them on it and they say, I never said that. Well, are they lying, or do they really believe? they never said that. Based on the definition that myself and other researchers use with lying, if you come to believe something that is a lie, then we'd say it no longer counts as a lie. So really the definition hinges on you believing something contrary to what you're communicating to others. Because if someone believes something that's not honest or truth for matches with reality,

then we would refer to that as delusional. And so this is an important clinical distinction that someone, you know, if I tell you right now that the sky is green and purple, when in actuality it's blue with some clouds right now, if I believed that it's blue with clouds and I tell you that it's green and purple, then, you know, I'm lying. Now, if I actually believe that it's green and purple, we'd say I'm delusional because I'm believing in something and I'm not communicating that falsely to you. Well, it occurs to me that one of the reasons that lying is so pervasive and that everyone does it is there are lots of examples where it is a winning strategy.

You can lie your way out of some trouble often, which is evidence that lying can be a real winning strategy. It can be a winning strategy for some. You know, the flip side of this is that most people are honest most of the time when looking at the research on lie. frequency, most people tell zero lies within a 24-hour period. But it's the smaller group of people that are lying in excess. And so if you say, is lying strategy really effective, I would say not for the majority of people, but it is for a small group of people that, as I mentioned, might use it in their jobs, in leadership, in administrative positions, and sales, or some areas where it can possess or give them some advantage. And then on the flip side of that coin,

you have pathological liars where they're lying is not giving them an advantage, but clearly severing their relationships and causing distress. Well, that surprises me that you say most people don't lie. In 24 hours, they don't tell any lies. Because that's just, I don't know, it seems odd to me. It seems like people lie more than that. Yeah, it was really the kind of the crux of what a lot of my research on pathological lying came from, and in some of the work of Kim Serota and Timothy Levine, and they looked at lie distribution and lie frequency. What was often cited historically for deception researchers is that people tell on average two lies a day. But when you look more closely, while the average is correct, the mode or the most lies told, it's

zero. And so Timothy Levine has what's called truth default theory, is that most people are honest most of the time. And it's only those instances where we think the truth won't work that we lie. We're talking about lying, why we all do it, and the consequences for doing it. And my guest is Drew Curtis. He's a licensed psychologist and author of the book Big Liars. Hey, it's Hilary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages.

But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortest. I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmist. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale. Not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales that your children have heard so many times. No, we tell the real grim fairy tales.

They're funny, they're weird, sometimes they're a little bit scary. But don't worry, we rate every episode grim, grimmer, or grimist, so you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right. level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist, and our new season, available now. So, Drew, it would seem that one of the reasons you wouldn't want to lie is if you lie and you get caught, you're now a liar. It taints you.

If you told me this lie, then how do I know the next thing you tell me isn't a lie? And how do I know what I can trust that you say? For sure. you know, I think that's what I find interesting about the label of liar, is that it, in your words, taints you. And so now, people like Nietzsche's quote, it's not that you've lied to me, but it's that I can no longer trust you. And so it's really the connotations of what that hinges on. And one of the games I like to, you know, ask students or people I interact with games slash question is if you, if someone lies to you, we call them what? And usually we say liar. And then I ask you to put the shoe on

the other foot. If you lie, you do it because, well, and we rarely call ourselves liars, we say we lie because some good reason. I find an interesting one of the functions of us as humans is that others do this behavior because that's who they are. They're bad people. They're liars. But we do it with some reason, and usually it's a good reason, to spare a social situation, to make it less awkward, to spare someone's feelings, make them feel better. We have all these good intents in our mind of why we lie, but others are flat out bad people when they lie because they're liars. Is it a lie, do you think, if someone asks you, you know, does this dress, do these pants, does this jacket look good on me? And it doesn't. But you don't want to

hurt the person's feelings and you say no it looks fine it's it's great no you're you look great and we call that a white lie because the intent is to make the other person feel good it's actually some of the research others have done and myself with chris hart is people that people are somewhat hypocritical even with white lies in relationships we think it's acceptable to tell white lies to those we're in a relationship with, but we don't think it's acceptable for them to do the same to us. So something like, we want the brutal, honest truth, but others, we need to protect them and spare their feelings. And the research indicates that white lies are actually negatively correlated with relational satisfaction. So while we think they don't have a cost, they actually

do. What could be the cost if, you know, your spouse wakes up and they, you know, they don't, their hair's messed up and they look terrible and you say, oh, you look great. And they don't look great, but what could possibly be the harm to the relationship in saying that rather than, oh, my God, no, you look terrible. There's two potential ways that it can be harmful. One is what some researchers deemed deceivers distrust. So the more we lie to others, we assume they're doing that to us. So even if I'm telling others lots of white lies, I'm assuming they're doing the same thing to me.

And that can cause me to be distrustful of others. So that's one consequence for the liar. For the receiver or the relationship, back to the association of being caught in lies, is that you can't be trusted. So even if it's a good lie, you say, well, this person lied and they did it for me. Nonetheless, they still lied. So how can I trust them about other things they say?

Or what else are they not telling me is where that may cause relational problems. So sometimes it seems that those white lies are not lies so much as, you know, I don't really have an opinion. So I'll just tell you what I think you want to hear. It's not like I'm deceiving you. I don't really, you know, when you say, how does this outfit make me look? I don't know. It looks great. It looks fine.

I'm not really lying because I don't really have an opinion. Sure. Or how about stating that, right? That I don't really have an opinion or fairly indifferent. You know, I think there's a number of ways you could respond that don't necessarily communicate a dishonesty. You know, if you're saying you're indifferent or you don't have a strong opinion, I think that's a way to be honest without saying you look fantastic or that's the best out or, you know, you look the best in that outfit today. It just seems like that's better than what are you thinking?

You're not going out in public in that. And I think that's the mindset for most of us. When we tell white lies, we think that it's going to make the relationship better, at least in the moment. And if you allow me, you know, one of the, back to the predicting future, you know, I did this with my son. Years ago, we had purchased him a beta fish. And it's the first time we had a fish in the family. Unfortunately, the water was too cold and had a bad instrument. woke up in the morning to a lifeless gray bait of fish.

And I felt so bad about this and my wife did as well. And we were discussing what should we do? Should we lie to our son and I go to the pet store and get him a new fish or tell him the truth? At the time, I'd been studying parental deception. And there's a positive correlation between, once again, relational satisfaction and parental honesty. So the more you're perceived to be honest, the better relationship. So I said, let's go ahead and let's just tell him the truth. So on one hand, parents in this situation, I think, predict if you tell the truth,

you're going to psychologically scar your child or traumatize your child. And certainly that's what myself and my wife were thinking or wondering. On the other hand, we didn't know. So I went with the truth and I told him what happened. and asked him, what did he want to do? And without missing a beat, he said, let's go to the store and get a new fish, not emotionally traumatized, not scarred, not bothered at all by the dead fish. So I think that that's a situation where I could have predicted a negative outcome,

but one actually didn't happen. You know, the truth worked fine. And in some ways, it worked better than maybe years later he says, oh, well, dad's always lying to me about fish because he can't. You know, he doesn't think I can take it. But that just, I mean, that, man, that's a, that's a mind field because, you know, what about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? I mean, those are big, fat lies that everybody tells their kids. Yeah.

And so a follow-up that I did was on those things was Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, tooth fairy, and the boogeyman. And it was kind of interesting the findings from that. there was no significant relationship between parents telling their children about Santa and parental satisfaction or dissatisfaction. And so one of the ways I kind of thought about this is maybe that it's deemed to be this collective cultural narrative. So it's not perceived by children as a lie. So is the case of these mythical characters with the exception of the boogeyman.

So the boogeyman is perceived typically for behavioral conduct. control. You know, if you get out of your bed, the boogeyman's going to get you or something like that. And we do find that that was negatively correlated with parental satisfaction. What about, though, when parents say things that aren't necessarily alive, but they're not necessarily true either. You know, if you don't study hard and get good grades, you won't get into college kind of thing. Well, yeah, maybe, but you might, you might not even want to go to college. So, and you can, you probably get into a community college. So, but we say those things to kids to pressure them to do well in school. Is that a lie or is that just parental pressure? For deception researchers, like myself, we'd have to say, what's the intent? So if the parents are communicating something they don't believe to be true, we'd say that that's a lie.

But I would bet that most parents are probably saying those things. Maybe they think it's true. If you don't do X, then you won't. receive why. So parents will use that for behavioral control or once again the emotional control to make you feel, feel good about yourself or encourage you. You're the best artist I've ever seen. This is the best piece of art I've ever seen. And is that a lie? If they don't believe it, it is. Seems pretty harmless though. I mean, if you've been to a museum, you've seen art that's better than a kindergartner's art. So it's hard to imagine.

that that would be the best art you've ever seen, but to say it to a kid, I don't know. I mean, it's kind of a gray area because you could rephrase it and make it technically truthful, or you could just say that's the best thing I've ever seen. That's right. Or you could praise, you know, one of the things a psychologist we might do if we're giving some kind of psychological assessment is praise the effort. You know, and you could, as you mentioned, be technical. There's a number of ways you can communicate honestly. And so I think the consequence, you mentioned it seems fairly harmless.

I think the potential consequence is, once again, where children are thinking, well, my parent lied about this, what else can I trust them on? And not just parents, I think, once again, can be intimate relationships or other relationships. The tolls of dishonesty come back to trust. Even if it's a little white lie. And that's the thing I think I really take away from this conversation is the assumption is little white lies don't really have any consequences. And yeah, they do. I've been talking with Drew Curtis.

He is a licensed psychologist on the faculty at Angelo State University. And author of the book Big Liars, what psychological science tells us about lying and how you can avoid being duped. And there's a link to the book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thank you, Drew. Appreciate your time. is a pleasure speaking with you. Do you love Disney?

Then you are going to love our hit podcast Disney Countdown. I'm Megan the Magical Millennial. And I'm The Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top ten lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney theme games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed,

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You've no doubt noticed that there are private companies that have joined the space race. Elon Musk's SpaceX is probably the most visible, but lots of companies are building and sending rockets and satellites into space. It used to be that going into space was such a huge deal and so expensive that only governments could do it. So if private companies are now doing it, there must be money to be made, or at least the potential for money to be made. And in fact, there is a lot to this story I never knew, and I doubt most people do.

Here to shed some light on it is Ashley Vance. He's a New York Times best-selling author and feature writer at Bloomberg Business Week. He's author of a book called When the Heavens Went on Sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. Hi, Ashley, welcome to something you should know. Thank you so much for having me. So I think most people are old enough to remember that the only people going into space from this country were the people at NASA, that it was a government program, and that the whole people.

whole idea of going to space, as President Kennedy said, when he said we were going to go to the moon. He said, we do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard. And there was something very patriotic about it. But it was a government thing. There was no profit motive. Something changed. So what changed? We obviously had this tremendously exciting era where, you know, space was government-backed, but we were in the middle of this space race and did incredible things in the 60s and 70s. But then we kind of got stuck. And this became more of a bureaucratic exercise dominated largely by military and government contractors. And we built rockets the same way we always had. And we built satellites mostly the same way we always had. And in space lost

some of its luster and definitely some of its, you know, it's its passion and its speed and its its pursuits of new things. And back then, there was no talk about how do we make money on this. So private businesses were not involved. Were they not involved because they didn't see the potential of going to space or because it was just so complicated and expensive, only governments could do it? Yeah, you know, it's a combination of things. I mean, it was definitely expensive.

Some rich people had tried in the, even the late 90s, early 2000. to get into space to build rockets they usually found it was much harder than they expected and NASA was always looming there as really a competitor you know it's Elon Musk and SpaceX who launched their very first rocket in 2008 they really changed things and showed that that a private company a commercial company could do things differently they could do things much much cheaper than what had been done before there was a lot of new materials and modern technology that could be put at play.

And so there was this clean slate kind of idea where we've been doing things the same way for decades. Let's try something new. Somebody finally succeeded at it. And this unlocked all this latent energy for space all around the world when people saw SpaceX have done it. And was there a sense of like did NASA go,

hey, wait a minute, you can't do that? I mean, or was it, yeah, come on in and join the party? It was a mixed bag, to be sure, so there were factions within NASA. I mean, you know, I'd say roughly kind of 20%, 25%, some of the highest up people at NASA, they encouraged SpaceX, and they formed partnerships with SpaceX to try and accelerate the development of its technology and commercial space more broadly. There was still this huge chunk of not just NASA, but the government, all the, the, the, all the, the, the, military contractors, people like Lockheed and Boeing who affiliated with them, who did not want to see things change. And they thought, who are these Silicon Valley people coming in to tell us how to

do space? They don't know how hard this is and how to do it properly. And so there was a pretty visceral fight against this happening. And so if you were to ask Elon Musk then or now, why, why go into this business of launching rockets into space, what is it? What was the motive? Did he see the profit motive or was it more of an ego thing? Like he just wanted to have his rocket in space or what? We forget now because he's the world's richest man. When he started SpaceX, he was wealthy but not nearly as wealthy as he is now. And in fact, SpaceX almost bankrupted him. And he did have to turn it into a for-profit company, which was sorted to its benefit. It's moved so fast, so much faster than any other commercial space company, I think in large part

because it was like a fight for survival. This company was not going to be bankrolled forever. My point is that this has become a capitalist exercise, and the governments that control this stuff for decades are moving out of the way. And among all these other companies, some of it now is just to make money on rockets and satellites and data and communications. And so people are coming at this from different points of view. And so what is the profit motive? Where is the money for shooting rockets into space today? You know, there's different buckets of this stuff.

There's the Mars people, there's the moon people, there's the space tourism people. The most obvious place where there's lots of money right now to be had is in low Earth orbit where most of the satellites fly. And, you know, we are going from, so tradition, for the last like 10 years, there's been roughly 2,000 satellites around us. We're already up to 10,000. We're on this exponential curve of putting more satellites in space. That number is going to go from 10,000 to 100,000 by the end of this decade. And so the opportunity right now is to build what I call like a computing shell around the earth. And it's full of communication systems, science, imaging systems that are

taking pictures of the earth and analyzing it all the time. And so to me, this is the clearest place to make money, it looks like quite soon the moon is actually getting privatized and there's private missions there. And beyond that, you know, I think it's anyone's guest. Stuff like Mars is still much more of just like a science experiment to me. So this isn't so much about conquering the universe as it is about much more practical things then, about satellites and low Earth orbit and the moon and, you know, closer to home stuff. Absolutely. I would argue the public's perception of what's going on is sort of been misplaced by the, whatever, the romanticism or excitement of Mars and space tourism. We are building, just like in the early days of the consumer

internet, we had to lay all this fiber optic cable and build data centers all around the world to support our modern computing infrastructure. We're building a very similar thing right around us in space. And so it does things like people have probably heard of Starlink, which is this space internet system that sends high-speed internet. down from satellites to anywhere on Earth. So for the first time, we're going to have always on high-speed Internet blanketing the planet. There's another company called Planet Labs.

They have 250 satellites that take images of every spot on the Earth every day. So not even governments can do this, but this private company can. It's not like espionage. It's really following where buildings are going, where oil tankers are going, what's happening to forest in the Amazon. So all this very real data about the sum total. of human activity on this planet. And so this is where hundreds of billions of dollars

to start building this infrastructure. Is SpaceX, that was the first time that a rocket went into space and came back and landed and could be used again, correct? Yeah, not in those early days like we were talking about, but later SpaceX perfected these reusable rockets, which many people in the traditional aerospace industry said, it was never going to happen. It's impractical. It's borderline impossible. It turns out it's not.

And it consequently probably helps cut the cost when you can reuse a rocket rather than build one from scratch again. I imagine that saves money. Absolutely. I mean, this is, you know, you don't take a plane from New York to Los Angeles and then just throw it out at the end of the trip. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a commercial airline industry. So, you know, they've shown they've been able to reuse rockets many, many, many times. they've even flown humans on reused rockets. And so, you know, they have now, SpaceX, this was a startup just 20 years ago. They now have the longest track record of the most successful launches in a row.

They launch more than pretty much all other nations combined. And they're also the world's largest satellite manufacturer now in account for about, I don't know, it's probably about 60 or 70 percent of all the satellites in space. So right now, who are the players in the game here? Well, you have SpaceX that is the dominant force among the commercial players. You've got nation states like China, which is barging ahead quite quickly. But then you've got people don't know this, but you've got rocket startups and satellite startups all over the world. SpaceX's nearest competitor, the most successful other commercial rocket company, is called Rocket Lab.

They're actually based in New Zealand and was started by a guy named Peter Beck. who did not even go to university. So this is a guy he worked at a dishwasher and an appliance maker as an engineer and just did rockets on the side. And he's built really the world's cheapest, best engineered small rocket called Electron. And they've flown that about 40 times. So it doesn't take humans, but it takes satellites to space all the time. Planet Labs is kind of the dominant small satellite maker. So as I mentioned, they've covered the Earth with 250 imaging satellites and take photos of everywhere on Earth all the time.

And then right now we're in this race where there's about 10 other rocket startups all vying to prove themselves out. And there's about 100 satellite makers doing all kinds of different things. Isn't Jeff Bezos involved in this somehow? So Jeff Bezos started a company called Blue Origin almost the exact same year that Elon started space. and Blue Origin's story has not been as glorious as SpaceX's by any stretch of the imagination. They are doing some space tourism stuff now, so they'll fly you to the edge of space for a couple of minutes and let you float around. They've been dreaming of building a big rocket like SpaceX to carry satellites and humans one day.

But while SpaceX has done this many, many times Blue Origin has yet to fly that rocket. They're hoping to start flying it. next year. Why is it that it seems that it's rich people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who play in this arena? Like, is there, it's like a rich boys game kind of thing? Well, we, it was. We've transitioned to slightly less rich boys that are funding this stuff. You know, it was basically governments for about 70 years. Then you had these billionaires. You had Elon, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Paul Allen for Microsoft, all took a crack at. at various things. Elon was the only one who was really successful at it was SpaceX. And then

over the last six to seven years, what's happened is the venture capitalist who are rich, but we're not talking like billions of dollars anymore. You can start a satellite company for a few million and a rocket company cost you a bit more. But this is, you know, this is being funded by pretty typical investors who just invest in tech things. And so the price to get started and the price to actually get to space and do things in space has fallen dramatically. And can I, if I wanted to put a satellite or, you know, just a time capsule or just, I wanted to put something in space. I could call up SpaceX or one of these other companies and rent space on a rocket and they would launch it for me. You can literally enter your credit card information

now on a website and do that. But the cheapest to get something in the space is about probably about $250,000 is your starting price, which sounds maybe like a lot, but your starting prize just, say, six years ago was closer to about $60 million to get a spot on a rocket. And so right now we're seeing this flourish of activity. I mean, you could do something, you know, as a hobbyist if you wanted to, but really that reduction in price means we have a lot more satellite companies that can try out ideas. and we have a lot more scientists that can try out their ideas. You know, to fly an experiment for $250,000 is not a huge ask,

but $60 million made it almost impossible. Well, you mentioned the number I don't remember about how many satellites are up there. But, I mean, at a point, doesn't it get like it's just, okay, we're out of room that we can't have any more. They're going to crash into each other. Now we've got to do something else. Yeah. This is partly why I wanted to write about this is that.

I don't think people realize what's coming at all. We're probably not going to run out of room. It is quite spacious up there. Sorry. But there is this risk of collisions. A lot of these satellites are flying in similar paths, similar orbits. We have never lived in this world where you have to manage 100,000 objects in space. If something collides with another object, there's this thing called the Kessler syndrome.

where you basically create kind of a cascading debris field that just grows and grows and grows as more things bash into more things. And so this is the big concern. The companies are motivated to not have this happen because it would ruin low Earth orbit and all their investment in governments have similar motivations. And there are now startups that are tracking all of this debris. And I don't know if it makes people feel better or worse that there's startups doing this as opposed to governments, but that's the reality of the situation.

Well, right. With airplanes, you've got private airplane companies, but you've got the FAA, the air traffic controllers, keeping everything separated and safe and everything. But there's no FAA for this. The government, the U.S. government in particular, has tracked objects in space historically, although not as well as these startups do now. They have specialized antennas that see more objects and much. much smaller objects, the government has tried to put some sort of mechanisms around all this

to keep things functioning. But what I found, and I write about a lot, is that they were operating for decades in a regime where maybe one rocket from the United States went up a month. And now we are sending rockets up almost every day, every other day. We're going from sending up about 30 satellites a year to sending up thousands. of satellites a year. And so what I found is that the regulatory regimes are just not keeping pace at all with how fast commercial space is moving. We're sending up rockets every day. Yeah. So SpaceX is really, again, sort of the pace setter here. And for decades, I mean, any, the European space program, Chinese, American, really one rocket a month was

was the typical cadence if you know maybe one year you got like 16 SpaceX throughout this year through throughout 2023 is running at about every other day right now with a rocket and where do they send them up from it's a mix of spots mostly Florida and California and then now SpaceX is building their new you for their giant rocket that they're working on called starship that's in south Texas. Rocket lab flies often from New Zealand and also from Wallops Island near Virginia. And so those would be the prime spaceboards for U.S. companies. Talk about the company planet that you write about in your book. That's really interesting. It's pretty fascinating. I mean, so planet's one of the most interesting companies I've ever run across. For instance, so they have, you know, when you go on

Google maps. Most of those images are quite old. And if you're in a big city, you think, oh, this is really well covered, but that's only because it's a big city. You know, if you spread out across the world, there's not that many photographs. And so Planet has mapped every road on Earth very well. They have count, they have mapped every single trees. So they have an actual count of all the trees on Earth. Not only that, they use AI software to figure out what types of trees they are, which means you can figure out the biomass of the trees and how much carbon dioxide they pull in. And so they're sitting there watching places like the Amazonian rainforest to see when there's

illegal cutting of the forest. They watch, like Ukraine is probably the best example that people could relate to. You know, in the days leading up to the war, the Russians said, we're not going to attack Ukraine. The U.S. said, we are going to attack people, had to choose who they were going to believe. Planet had all these images of the troops in Belarus amassing on the border. It was Planet's images that we all saw on TV and newspapers of the Russian convoys being stuck on their way to Kiev. You know, in terms of like something like the cars, you can literally count how many cars are in

Walmart parking lots during back-to-school shopping season, and investors make decisions based on how much activity they see with things like that. And can I see those images or that's proprietary? No, that's the fascinating thing about Planet. Anyone can hop on Planet's website. You can get more recent, better images when you pay for their service, but anyone can hop onto their technology and poke around and have a look. And now this information is essentially open source.

It's out there for people to view. There's all kinds of analysts who work for nonprofits, who are using these images and publishing information about what's happening in the world, and it's not metered out by governments anymore. Do you know where I go to find those images? Yeah, it should be just planet.com. So the landscape or the spacep has changed dramatically where it used to be that governments pretty much controlled

what happened in space around us and not anymore. This balance of power that existed for decades where only a handful of slow-moving governments really controlled space is over. And it is obvious now that, you know, as we've gone from 2,500 satellites to 10,000 in just the last three years, almost all of those new satellites are commercial satellites. And the commercial companies now dominate this. It's going to be interesting to see how government players react to this. A country like Russia, which is a traditional space superpower, has no commercial space startups at all.

And its space program has been on the decline for many years, and there's huge questions. Will they be a rational actor in this new environment? The U.S. is lucky. Our space program was on a similar decline. It just so happens that SpaceX succeeded and inspired all these other companies. We now have far more commercial space startups than any country on Earth. So, you know, it's interesting times to see how this all plays out. Well, and as you pointed out, it's so fascinating because who knows how the story is going to unfold and who the players are going to be in 10 years from now.

If we have this conversation in 10 years, again, how things will be different. I've been speaking with Ashley Vance. He is a New York Times best-selling author. The name of his book is When the Heavens Went on Sale, The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. If you'd like to read it, you can get it at Amazon, and there's a link. to the book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you so much. You know, you can actually

sort of determine whether or not you're going to need an umbrella today by looking at a cup of coffee. You see, as you're pouring your coffee into your mug, take note of the tiny little bubbles that rise to the surface. If the bubbles move rapidly

to the cup's edge, it's going to be a nice day. That's because high pressure pushes the bubbles outward to the edge of your mug. High pressure indicates good clear weather. If the bubbles stay towards the center of the mug, the pressure is dropping, and clouds and rain are probably in the forecast. I'm not sure that's how the National Weather Service predicts the weather, but it's one way you can, and that is something you should know.

Ratings and reviews are helpful to every podcast, but you don't have to leave a rating and review for every podcast, just this one. Please leave a rating and review if you have a moment. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all.

Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortestime.com.