The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Planetary Insights: How Satellites Could Transform Our Understanding of Earth's Predicament with Will Marshall

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

When we are able to see the full scope of a problem, rather than a fragment, it changes how we respond. Throughout history, comprehensive data has catalyzed transformative change—from the measurements that spurred the halting of ozone depletion to the coral reef monitoring networks that revealed the devastating impacts of ocean acidification. Yet, the average person remains disconnected from visualizing their lifestyle's impact on Earth's systems, leaving an incomplete perception of our collective footprint. But what transformations might occur if we could observe the full consequences of our consumption patterns as they ripple across forests, oceans, and the atmosphere in real time? In this episode, Nate is joined by Will Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. Planet Labs' mission is to capture daily images and real-time data of the entire Earth using a fleet of hundreds of satellites, in order to make global change visible, accessible and actionable. Will shares how this data is being harnessed to tackle environmental challenges like deforestation and reducing methane emissions, and how AI is analyzing it to help governments, NGOs, and businesses make informed – and planet friendly – decisions. Will also emphasizes Planet Labs' commitment to transparency and accountability on a global scale, ultimately aiming to make substantial contributions to the pursuit of Earth's ecological integrity.  How can we harness this extraordinary technological innovation (and others like it) to better fulfill our roles as planetary stewards? What sorts of environmental projects – such as carbon trading or protecting coral reefs – benefit most from this new data? Finally, how are small communities using this data to create targeted, local environmental strategies that will build ecological wealth for future generations?  (Conversation recorded on March 14th, 2025)   About Will Marshall: Will Marshall is the Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs, where he leads the overall company strategy and direction. Prior to Planet, Will was a Scientist at NASA/USRA where he was a systems engineer on lunar orbiter mission "LADEE", a member of the science team for the lunar impactor mission "LCROSS", served as Co-Principal Investigator on PhoneSat, and was the technical lead on research projects in space debris remediation. Will received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oxford and his Masters in Physics with Space Science and Technology from the University of Leicester. Will was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at George Washington University and Harvard.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

I think sustainability and security are totally wrapped up together. It was the drought in Syria that led to a crop failure, that led to a humanitarian crisis and refugees spreading all over that region. And when Ukraine goes into war, we lose access to food, and food security goes out of the window. I think it happens that those things are interrelated and can be solved together with these sorts of smart technical systems. You're listening to the Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. I'm pleased to be joined today by Will Marshall, who is the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs, which provides governments, businesses, and research institutions with the highest frequency see satellite data, images and analytics available today, including the photographing of the entire planet at least once per day. He and I discussed the current projects at Planet Labs

that are working to improve the health of our Earth's ecological systems from tracking illegal deforestation in the Amazon to identify methane leaks that might otherwise go undetected coming from fracking operations. Prior to co-founding planet, Will was a scientist at NASA and the University Space Research Association, where he was a systems engineer on lunar orbiter missions and was the technical lead on research projects in space debris remediation. Alongside past and future projects, Will Marshall shares the mission behind Planet Labs' work,

which is to image all of Earth's landmass every day and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. In my opinion, the data coming from Planet Labs is one of the most positive use cases of artificial intelligence, with the potential to enable an unimaginable number of other projects and initiatives that are in service of life. Additionally, there are a few images from Planet Labs referenced throughout this episode. If you're listening on an audio-only platform, you can find these images under the show notes on the Great Simplification website. Before we begin, if you enjoy this podcast, one of the biggest ways you can support us is by subscribing to it on your favorite platform and sharing this episode with someone who might also enjoy it. We believe in making this content free and accessible to as many people on Earth as possible.

So we appreciate your support. With that, please welcome Will Marshall. Will Marshall. Great to see you. Great to see you too. We are here at Planet Labs headquarters where you just. gave me an incredible tour. This is a lot of impressive technology for a Wisconsin boy. So you are a physicist and you make satellites, send them to space to look at Earth. How did you

get started in this? What led you from physics to creating planet labs? Ever since I was a kid, I was really interested in astronomy. And I even built my own telescope when I was a teenager. And what you learn when you look up, and I continue to do this through working at NASA, which we'll get into in our founding story of your planet, is that we've still not found any life. There is, it's mostly rocks and dead matter up there. And that only makes you more and more amazed at what we find here on the earth. So if you had told my seven-year-old self that I'd be building telescopes looking down from space, out of everyone, well, that's the wrong way around. But apart from that, it would have made sense.

The incredible vastness of the universe contrasted with the fact that we still haven't found life anyway. So it's either very rare or we're the only place of life in the universe. It gives an almost cosmological duty to take care of life on the earth. And so that's what was the initial motivation through my career. Have you ever seen a little short movie called The Overview Effect? Has that happened to you where when you started to work and you started to see the images coming in from your technology, did it actually intensify the emotion that you just described? Yeah. And definitely the challenges that we see, which is devastating destruction of the rainforests and the coral reef systems dying and things like that. For sure, that's hard.

and it only motivates you even more. It also motivates you even more when you see how they can help people to fix the system. And we see that in abundance in some of our partnerships around the world where people, if you give them real-time information, can help fix some of those things. So give us an overview of the projects.

How does Planet access this real-time data? What are the main arcs of your work and your hopes and success? Yeah, I mean, at a top level, what planet has done is we've launched a few hundred satellites that image the entire Earth every day. Now, why do we do that? We did that because you need real-time information to take care of the planet. It's actually an engineering principle you learn quite early on if you go into technology

that you can't fix something if you don't have data on it on the relevant time scale. So if you spend a spacecraft into space and you're in a tumble, if you measure it once an hour but it's spinning once a minute, then you can't stop it. or if you're in a spacecraft and the oxygen rates are going down or the CO2 is going up, if you're not measuring it on the relevant timescale, it's going to be too late before you fix it. But there's no such system for the Earth. We are a collective ecosystem of life on the Earth, but we didn't have the relevant data on the relevant timescale.

So the mission we set ourselves out was to image the entire Earth landmass once per day to get into the human timescale of evolution on the planet. You know, if there's deforestation in the Amazon and it takes place over days and weeks, there's no point measuring it once a year. And that's roughly what we were doing before Planet came along. And we basically took that to a daily scan so that we can get inside that decision-making loop and help enable people to make smarter decisions. How many satellites are there now? We have about 200. We have the two fleets of satellites, mainly one that does this daily scan and then a higher-resolution fleet that can zoom in on any particular location.

up to 10 times per day. And like when you say zoom in, like how, what's the resolution? The present best resolution we have is about 50 centimeters, but we're just launching a system that's going to get even better than that down to 30 centimeters. Can you give an example of what that would be like? Yeah, I mean, that's like seeing, you know, you can easily see vehicles and even identify the kind of vehicle from, and we're 500 kilometers away.

So that's like taking a picture from here in San Francisco of Los Angeles and seeing vehicles and things like this. So the satellites are 500 kilometers up in the sky. And you're doing real-time minute or every hour or continuous? Once per day, the whole earth, and then up to 10 times per day for any particular location where we are getting, where we have particular interest. And some of those have been going for months, years?

Now we've been doing this total daily scan now for about seven years. So you have compiled an eneastern, enormous amount of like time lapse images of everywhere on earth. Yeah, on average, we have about 3,000 images for every point on the Earth's landmass. Do you ever like on a Friday night, this is a Friday, do you ever like grab a beer and just look at some place in central Africa or in Indonesia just out of curiosity? Are you overloaded with so much all the time?

Yeah, I sometimes look at the imagery like that. And we have a Slack channel called Interesting Picks that always flat. up crazy things that either people or the machine learning is detecting. And then we're like, what is that? So that's the channel I tend to tune into when I have a free moment. And it's incredible. And what you learn is the earth is constantly changing. So when you think about maps, you think about whether it's a classic old map or Google Maps

online and you go to the satellite layer, you think of it as a static thing. But actually, when you look at our images, you realize it's an evolving thing. and this dynamism of the earth really speaks very quickly if you start looking at a time lapse. So has it accentuated your love for Earth or also the tragedy that's unfolding or a little bit of both? Yes, exactly, both. I mean, as I said, we've almost, I feel, have a cosmological duty to the protection of life, given the rareness of life in the universe. And I see Planet's role as helping to hold up a mirror so that we can understand those changes in the relevant time scale to make smarter decisions.

So if your company and your work are wildly successful, what could you envision two, three, four, five years from now that's an outcropping of all this? Well, look, I hope that we can make a serious positive impact in two main areas, I think about. sustainability and security. And the sustainability realm, our hope is that people can take this data and integrate it into smarter decision-making. Sustainable agriculture, stopping deforestation, helping us to manage fisheries sustainably and so on.

And in security, how can we shed a light that helps drive accountability and reduce warfare? You know, basically underpinning both of those areas, is data can help drive accountability. Basically, we're bringing a big transparency maneuver over the planet. And with that information, it comes to the power to make smarter decisions. So, you know, the deforestation example is kind of obvious.

You get the data of the person that's doing the deforestation in the relevant timescale. Then you can go and stop it happening. Oh, it's almost like the candid camera environmental police of sorts. Yeah. So let me give you this specific example in Brazil. We monitor all of the Brazilian Amazon. Every week we do a search for new roads across all of the 8 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon. That's almost the size of the United States. And when we find a new road, that is normally a sign of either illegal deforestation, illegal narcotics, a new illegal mine.

The federal police did 3,000 interventions using that data last year, so almost 10,000. 10 per day where they send people to those locations in helicopters and what have you to stop that action. It confiscated $3 billion worth of illegal equipment and most importantly significantly reduced deforestation rates. So you send a dossier of the recent images to your colleagues in Brazil. And the AI on top that gives them the alerts of where the problems are happening because they can't very well look.

I mean, so we download about 4 million images, 47 megapite images every day. So there's no way a human can scroll through those? A single human is not going to look through all this imagery. But we can use AI as interns, if you like, have thousands and thousands of AIs that look across AI interns, looking across all of this data and finding the things that the humans need to look at. So that's a checkmark on one positive thing that AI might be able to do for us. And that's in the sort of sustainability realm. And in the security realm, take Ukraine.

We can bring accountability to what's going on there. when people found mass graves, our data could show who did what, when, because we can go backwards in time and do the digital forensics. When there was claims that Russia is not bombing civilian targets, we could show on the front page of the New York Times the next day, here are the five hospitals and schools that were bombed, et cetera, et cetera. I think that becomes in time a deterrent from doing those sort of things. Because, and actually slightly bigger picture, back through history, we've seen most wars have begun when there was a lack of information or people took

a lack of information and had to take the worst case scenario and then they do something risky and then you fall into a war. It's when you have information, it's when you have a lack of information, you're more likely to fall into war. When you have information about where each other's military capabilities are, you're less likely to fall into a war. War often happens through mistakes, not deliberate action. Wouldn't governments have their own satellites doing this stuff? They do, but they don't have as many.

You have more satellites than governments? Yes. In Earth imaging, we've got the largest imaging fleet of any actor, quite a bit bigger than anyone else's. but they specialize in typically is super high resolution. So I said 30 centimeters, well maybe they're three centimeters. You know,

they're much higher resolution. But they are looking through a soda straw at a tiny area of the earth. And they spend a huge amount per satellite. Like the US government sometimes spends three or four billion dollars on a single satellite. So these are huge school bus-sized satellites with massive telescopes looking down

so they can get exquisite resolution, but what that trades is coverage. So what they can do is zoom in on a particular location and know exactly what's going on with better precision than we'll ever do probably. But what they can't do is scan the whole earth and find new changes with that sort of system. So we're like the peripheral vision for humanity

and sometimes these governments. Is Moore's law apply to the 30 centimeters and the one centimeter? Is it headed in that direction? the resolution like three years from now, they'll be able to detect from 500 kilometers a human face. Is that going to be possible? There is a improvement curve, but it's not anything like Mawr on the optics. Okay.

So where there is improvement is in the electronics. So typically when we're at NASA, a typical mission costs a billion dollars, sometimes a few hundred millions, sometimes a few billion, but order of magnitude of billion dollars per satellite. And the main trick that we did was focus on leveraging consumer-grade electronics, like the phone in your pocket and the stuff that's developed there. And that tends to be miniatrised and it's pretty robust. And we leverage that technology to build our satellites. And that is following Moore's law. And what that leads to is more processing power in orbit,

more faster radios, better sensors. So the data side of it and the computer, side of it is improving very fast along the lines of Moore's Law. In fact, we have a mantra we're trying to strap space to Moore's Law so that every time we launch the satellite, it's going to produce three times more data or ten times more data than the previous version. But the one place that doesn't apply is the optics because no one's figured out a way to improve that in any sort of digital way that makes sense. So an optic is optic and so you just have to get to a bigger telescope or fly lower to get to a higher resolution. And

doing that a 10x on that is not easy. So we met a couple months ago and one of the things you told me is that you believe that biodiversity and ecocide are more urgent, lower cost, high impact environmental areas than climate change and that you are playing a role in that with your Earth imaging. Can you explain what you meant by that? Absolutely. I mean, look, the planet obviously faces a number of sustainability challenges, climate and global warming, biodiversity loss and ecocide, also pollution in rivers, various other pieces. I like the planetary boundaries. Framework is a as a quick snapshot of how we're doing across these different measures. I would say the climate one has grabbed the headlines and I'm not sure that's smart. I think we're much further along in the ecocide and

I think it's much more profound. I think also from a marketing standpoint, if I can think about it like that. It was an unwise choice of focus for the sustainability and environmental community because climate is distant and it's hard to understand. And whereas losing life, losing nature around,

everyone cares about that. Ask a child, they care about that. They care about other birds, are there less birds in the forest nearby? Are there less animals? And there are. we've dramatically wiped out life on the earth. And the other reason I think of it is that it's primarily a problem that we've already created,

whereas a lot of the climate stuff is in our future. This is already, we've already wiped out 70% of life on the earth, roughly speaking, according to IPBES reports and, well, Wildlife Foundation. 70% of average population size. On average population size, which is a massive ecosystem. And the question is only when you start, whittling it down to that, at what point do you lose the ecosystem viability? And we don't know. So I imagine you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of time lapse loops, even in the last

seven years that are colorful, that almost probably look like the proliferation of a cancer cell time lapse. Is there a place that you, are these available to the public to see things? Or how do you highlight this? It's a great question. I mean, we do share time lapses with media when they ask for them and NGOs. We have a huge program with universities to provide our data to universities to help. So there's, I don't know, 30,000 university researchers that are using our data, for example, to try to get that data out there to understand this more, as well as bring greater awareness to the challenges. So give me an example. What are we looking at here? Well, here's an example of deforestation occurring over time.

People are probably familiar with this sort of time lapse. You see the inroads first of the loggers before they even take down trees, and this is how we can detect the deforestation before they even take down trees. But the logging roads go in first, and then you can see the deforestation starts happening and around those roads. Here's another example where we see some coral reef bleaching. that's probably because of increased temperature locally in that area of the ocean. And this is a final example of a new satellite we just launched, which is a hyperspectral satellite.

So what you're seeing here is a set of methane plumes, of plumes of gas of methane arising up from these different mainly gas, oil and gas facilities. And the great thing here is we can actually pinpoint the location of these gas emissions, so that operators of those can go and fix them. And nobody wants the gas leak. The environment certainly doesn't want it, but nor do the operators, because it's just a waste. And so by helping to point them out,

we can help fix that. So what are the filters that are being used because methane is invisible? Correct. It's a colorless gas, but it absorbs in a particular spectrum. So this is a hyperspectral instrument. So instead of having three colors like the eye,

we have 420 colors across a slightly wide. wider spectrum. I think it's from about 400 nanometers to about 2.5 microns. And they, each different element has slightly different features in different spectral ranges. And in methane in particular case, there's a deep absorption band, a particular wavelength. And so when we detect that, depending on the depth of that absorption band, we can estimate the amount of methane in that pixel. So for non-climate reasons, there would be a business reason for oil and gas companies to say,

hey, we didn't know we had this leak here. This particular one of my favorite examples. This is, we released the first 300 last COP meeting. And we released into the public just to showcase this technology. And within a week or two, this operator, as you can see, has turned off this leak. And that one leak is 7,000 kilograms per hour of methane. And I did a rough calculation. That's about the same as 10,000 cars going full speed on the motorway. Or if you take into account the duty cycle, that's an equivalent of about 300,000 cars

being taken off the road. That one leak. That one leak. So quick maths, if you did about a thousand of those per quarter, which we think there's one satellite could find a thousand leaks like that per quarter around the world, you could, it's almost the equivalent of about taking all the US cars off the road. That's incredible. Yeah. And so that's, you're planning on doing that. Absolutely. Yeah. The satellite hasn't quite finished. It's, uh, um, uh, commissioning, but as soon as this is, this isn't like putting a tax on carbon or anything. This is part of business, doing business. You're getting paid by oil and gas companies for this information. Yeah. So we've got a number of partnerships, it's useful for the NGOs that are trying to track this and the universities

that are trying to research it. But most practically, it's useful for the oil and gas companies and waste facilities and ag companies that are the dominant sources of methane emissions to have that to know where their leaks are to go and fix them. And then for the regulators, it is a cheap and efficient way of regulating this without having to send people everywhere with these little sensors, they can just look in our imagery. So do you have either an AI intern or a real human that gives you a weekly Monday morning briefing, like this is stuff we'd never seen before and you need to look at this boss? No, but I should. Good idea. I'm going to work on that.

I mean, I would be a kid in a candy store because I love the earth so much and the fractals that you can see from space and all the colors. We do sometimes print out our beautiful images and take a look at it. But yeah, we should do more of that. It's so beautiful. We definitely take pride in that here at planet, the beauty of the imagery that comes down, and also taking pride in the satellites. We have art on the side of the satellites, art on the side of the ground stations and other things,

because we want, yeah, we just want our work to be beautiful as well as impactful. I mean, this is a naive question, but there should be, like, beautiful, glossy coffee table books and an art exhibit with only planet images. like, are you doing that? Yeah, I've got a book for you before really. Really? Okay, because this gets to the heart of it. Like, Carrie Stover works with planetary boundaries and Johann Rockstrom.

Yep. And they're doing this annual health check. Yep. How does your work overlap with something like that? They're trying to do an annual health check of the planet on the different boundaries. Well, certainly that's a really important initiative. And we're helping as best we can with that. initiative, some of those parameters we can measure, some we can't, but where we can, we certainly

willing to help provide our data. So one of the questions I asked her when we did a podcast was, is it a lack of information? Is it a lack of seeing these time lapse photographs of what's happening to the earth? Oh my gosh, I love the forest. I love the animals. I love the biodiversity. This is happening. But we kind of know enough and we haven't really changed our behaviors. So what you're doing is definitive, undeniable, like real-time data. So maybe that will change at higher scales. But what are your opinions on that whole trajectory? Well, I think it's a great question because it's, but it's a sociological one.

And I'm not a sociological expert. But what I would say is a mixture of, I think this data can be, because it's more real time, can be much more practical. when you're told, well, roughly speaking, we have this ecological problem. Not here's the incursion onto the park near your house yesterday. It's a very different contemplation, right? One, you're like throwing your hands up, you're not, don't know what to do. And the other, you're like, okay, well, there's something I can do here right now.

So it's actionable and specific as opposed to general. The second thing is that just whilst it is true, so I think it can help. But the bigger thing is sociological changes, right? We've got to behavior change tends to happen when you look back. We're only when humanity decides something is important. Yes. When we had COVID, we decided it's important and we changed our behavior. We didn't shake hands.

We didn't go to the office. We flew with a mask on. All these other changes. We as a species basically haven't yet decided that the environment is an important issue. and it's partly, I think, because of a time scale, the COVID pandemic onset was four months. Here, the onset of that biodiversity loss we were talking about earlier has been 40 years. Those couple of orders of magnitude make it harder for humans to gather with.

Was it that grand said there were more birds here? It's like, what does that mean? You know, it's hard to be when the time scale is slower. But I think people are starting, younger generations see it more, they feel it more, they understand the urgency, they know we're in a predicament. I think the good thing I see is that, again, when humans decide something is important, they will do something about him. We did with COVID. I actually think changes of behavior to help the planet are less than the changes of behavior we did for COVID. How so?

Well, I think, just think, like, some of the biggest things we can do are really quite simple. We can fly a little bit less. We can change our diets a little bit less meat, more plant-based. We can vote for green politicians. None of these things are dramatic. They're not like having to never fly. They're not like having to, you know, it's just, it's not that big a change. And I think that there's, and the other thing that gives me hope is that these flips of society-wide attitudes can happen fast.

They did to homosexuals. They did to smoking. They did to these. And it just seemed to happen overnight when it happened, you know. Suddenly there we got to some threshold of decision that we're like, why are we doing that? You know, why are we homophobic or why are we smoking a lot in bars and all smoking each other? So when I hang out with people like you that obviously care deeply about. planet Earth. It's like these are my people, but we're still kind of a minority in the larger.

But isn't there some threshold of when 3% of the population gets to this point? So you hope that planet can help accomplish that. Well, I think planet can help on both the practical thing like the regulation of methane and the company's fixing it. And it can help with the awareness by sharing that. And I think satellites are particularly useful role because we've got humanity is now in a phase where we need to be planet. We created planetary scale challenges, but you also have to act locally, right? So how do you square that circle? Satellites can enable you to zoom out, see the big picture, and zoom in and see the action

that you need to take locally. You know what I'm saying? I do know what you're saying, and I have an idea, and maybe you've already thought of it and applied it to your business. So I have two ideas well. One is there is still in our country, the United States, one of the few countries in the world that doesn't really unanimously believe and understand that climate change is a problem.

There's still that dynamic. And right now this is March 14th. We're recording this. The EPA is being defunded and there's the FBI is going after climate orgs and things like that. But you could prove even if climate wasn't an issue, all of these other things. are incredibly real, urgent happening. And this is, so there's that. Then the second thing is,

climate change is a global issue and seems to be tough to handle, to manage. But you have the ability to take imagery of the county where I live in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Northern California by Mendocino, where some local ecologically aware people would want to know, look at what's happening in our community. We want to protect this watershed. We want to protect these forests because look, people, look at what's happened in the last seven years.

Is there an initiative like that where there's a local planet initiative where they get, via some nonprofit or whatever, they get access to this data and they can build a local response to what's happening? Have you looked into that? What are your thoughts? Yeah. So generally, we're trying to support efforts like that, but it's early days. And the main reason that's limiting those sort of groups using our data today is that it's sort of an overwhelming amount of data. But here's where AI can really help. It can help democratize that value extraction. You know, we work with the big agencies like NASA or California or big companies, big agriculture companies on sustainable agriculture and stuff. but that's because they have whole teams of people that can deal with geospatial data. AI is democratizing that and making it way easier for small organizations to get value.

A local city council or that nonprofit group or that education. Yeah, so at a local level being able to do that. And again, connect it with the global, understand how their actions both help locally and globally. Yeah, I mean, I think that we can shed light unto your first idea, showing light on local practical things people can do. I absolutely think that we're in a situation where we have incredibly powerful tools to do that today. And we're massively under-leveraging them.

Why? What's the bottleneck? I think it's awareness. Most people don't know this capability exists and tools that enable it to turn from abstract satellite images to practical action to practical action. And between those are software layers and other tools that enable people to actually do practical things on the ground. So what if one of the viewers of our conversation is the county administrator for conservation in a big county in the United States, and they'd never heard of this at all? Is there a way for someone like that to get this data, even if it costs money and apply it in their local setting?

Absolutely. Yeah. We have a whole civil government. We work with many counties across the US on rate, we call it the speed camera for regulatory enforcement or permit enforcement. So for example, Humboldt County uses our data to track illegal marijuana growing. So it's legal to grow marijuana in Humboldt County, but you have to have a permit. And of course, half of the guys don't have a permit.

And they, instead of sending somebody out to all these places, they just look at our imagery, find it and then send them a fine in the mail. So with 30 CM resolution, you can see those old familiar spiky leaves. Not quite those, but the greenhouses that they're grown in. Oh, okay, got it. So is the environmental side of your work? I mean, you named it planet and you're an environmentally conscious person. Is it kind of a lost leader that the real profit that is the security and the governments

and the oil companies to get leaks? but the environmental awareness and the images that I've seen in your offices here is kind of a positive externality of the rest of the work? I believe that our business model is incredibly aligned to human interest. Let me explain. I think sustainability and security are totally wrapped up together. It was the drought in Syria that led to a crop failure that led to humanitarian crisis and refugees spreading all over that region and Europe. Increasingly, these things are coupled. When Ukraine goes into war, we lose access to food and food security goes out of the window.

We have complete coupling between these things. We have to solve them both. I think it happens that those things are interrelated and can be solved together with these sorts of smart technical systems. One of the best examples of this in my mind is that the fact that the Pentagon routinely puts environmental issues as one of the number of, top few threats that it faces because it recognizes that climate change and biodiversity loss are driving refugees which then drive security issues that they have to deal with.

These are cool-headed analytical people. They're not putting climate change in there to placate some consumer interest. But most people don't know that that's the case. I know. But I think that that, yes, so that's a separate problem awareness. But I wanted to also counter something else that sustainability is not a big business. I think it's a huge business. And what I mean by that is, look, the basic thing about capitalism is that you have to deal with externalities.

And we haven't dealt with externalities. So if somehow, I don't expect it to happen soon, but if there were to be a price on carbon or a price on. anything that's non-renewable in our society, all of your work would be 100x more important then at that moment. Exactly. But we can help that to happen. So we, last year, released a data product that we call a forest carbon planetary variable.

And what it does is it estimates for every tree on the planet, basically, in every three by three meter pixel of our data, which is roughly the size of a tree, a bit smaller, how much tree carbon there is, above ground carbon. So not only the number of trees, but the actual amount of carbon. Right. So, and the challenge with carbon markets has been, they'd be either being accurate,

but based on people measuring tape measures around tree trunks, which is accurate but not scalable, or they've been greenwash systems. That is, people have made rough estimates, but then it now is cheating. we think we can solve it with an accurate and scalable measurement of forest carbon. That can then in turn underpin carbon markets at scale where all the countries can agree how you measure it and how you exchange it therefore. And so this can underpin carbon markets and bring carbon and ultimately through a similar sort of but slightly more complex system, nature into our economic system.

This is really so incredible. Like if you have this amount of data on the earth, daily, multiple times per day in some areas, for seven years, and it's getting better, it kind of changes everything. Like, you probably have a hundred times more potential products than you have time or staff, even with the AI interns to do. Like, this changes everything, doesn't it? I think I hope so. Obviously, that's the core mission of planet is to try to, right? and you know it's a question of scaling that as fast as possible to into everyone's hands. Look, technology isn't a silver bullet.

It's a, you know, there's always good size and bad size of technology. We are, and it's all about the social systems and how they couple with that technology to use it smartly. But generally, more data about how the planet is. doing, where's deforestation, where's the ice caps, where, how are the coral reefs doing, and where the gas leaks, where the tanks and troops is better for everyone. So one of my concerns about the future is the brittleness and fragility of the global, just in time, six-continent supply chain and the complexity of that. But you're taking pictures of the world constantly. Is there any way that your technology can help improve our global supply chain

situation? Potentially, we've definitely had clients look at supply chains to understand and check that their supply chains come from sustainable sources, like if they're using for furniture, comes from a sustainable source, with one case, you know, as an example. But in terms of the efficiency of supply chains and stability of them, I think so. I haven't seen that sort of application. So what about privacy? Is there going to be some problem in the future where people know there are satellites and they don't want their land or whatever? Or is this in the purvey of international commons? Is that something that you are worried about or think about? So satellites are in international territory. So a country's sovereign area goes up to 100

kilometers above their land and out to 12 nautical miles from their coast. But above 100 kilometers, it's international territory, just like way outside of their sovereign waters, it's the high seas. And it was agreed back in the 60s that anyone can fly over anyone else's territory on a satellite and take a picture. So this is considered an international domain. And in terms of personal privacy, our data can't identify a person or get to that level, right? If you only have a couple of pixels for a person, even if they lie down, you can't identify them. You need much, much higher resolution for that. Drones, you can do that, but drones then have, you know, that's just a different business.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would imagine there's huge applications for universities and research using this data. So you have partnerships with universities? Can you tell us a like one or two exciting projects? Oh, so many. I love what universities are doing. And not only is it important for science, it also drives the applications. So we see papers all the time on the latest sustainable agriculture practices or this is a method for counting.

So we did, I mentioned the tree carbon example and that planetary variable. The next place we want to go is into blue carbon. And I just saw a paper a couple of months ago that it was estimating the carbon in the seagrass. Because most seagrasses in the top 15 metres of water, we can see to that. And they show that they could pretty accurately measure the amount of carbon in seagrass. Well, if you can get blue carbon as well as the green carbon, above ground carbon, and then you can get the emissions. That's what we're doing now with the Tanager satellite that I mentioned,

with a hyperspectral satellite, then you've got three of the four, then you just need brown carbon, the soil carbon. But then, in principle, for every hectare of the earth, you could have the amount of carbon in the soil, the amount of carbon above the ground

or in the water, and in emissions. And between those things, you've basically got a counting system for carbon across the planet. That sort of thing is underpinned by scientific research. We're not going to get there without that.

Dude, this just seems like, such an incredible opportunity with this technology and the data, but it seems like a lack of coordination. Like there needs to be an international government body on behalf of Earth's environment. And then there needs to be national and then maybe local that are synergized with this data because you can't do this all. You're providing the service, but it's who's using the service that needs to be better organized somehow. Yes. What, your thoughts on that? Well, 100%. I mean, but you know, you've got to focus on what's in your control, and right now I can't control global government. So I'm focused on this technology. But you're

100% right, pointing to the problem. So what we're trying to do is focus on getting that data out to as many people as we can, democratize access it by building the tools that enable it to be easier and easy to use. And the efforts like this podcast, tell more people about it. So could there be, now I'm just totally spitballing here, but could there be a group of philanthropists that could start a nonprofit arm that pays you for your data, but has like completely environmental ecological aims that are centralized and there's a plan and a structure? Yeah, I mean, and there are many efforts that are a bit like that. I mean, you mentioned the planetary boundaries and the Earth dashboard or exactly, I can't remember exactly what they call it, but basically an annual health check for the planet. We're doing efforts like that. We're working with Al Gore's Climate Trace, which is all about tracking emissions,

like we help them track the on-off status of coal power plants around the world or things like this, hopefully in time we'll do emissions. So any efforts to help get real-time information out to many people, we work with Global Forest Watch and Global Fishing Watch, which are systems that many other NGOs use to then help their local efforts, But so we tend to help the platforms that then help the ecosystem of NGOs. This may be too sensitive of a question. But are you hiring and what are your constraints?

Like what are the limits to scaling your efforts, both on the security and the ecological environmental side? I think it's mainly a question of finance, and tools. And I think that AI is a potential accelerator to a lot of that. That's great. I do have my concerns about AI separately. But for us, I think it breaks down barriers to make it easier to leverage the data and use it.

So that's a great thing. So I'm in San Francisco, obviously, because I'm at your office. It's amazing to me because I have a more dystopian view of AI because I see some of the potential downsides, but being here the last few days, there's a lot of really ebullient, exciting pro-social humans that are working on AI on things that I was unaware of. So I could see how the merger of AI with all of your data could be something for the common good and for the future. Can you speculate on how AI might be able to leverage what you're doing now in a pro-social, pro-environmental way in coming years? It is an exciting.

time to be alive firstly and AI is taking off so fast. And being here in San Francisco, you know, there's a few blocks away from Anthropic one way, open AI the other, Google the other, you feel it. And the butt is just incredible. Now, there really are downsides as well as upsides. I mean, think about the upsides. I think I could explain a few, right? We can do better modeling of climate and weather. We can help ourselves do science better, faster, understand ecosystems. we could help solve some of the stability issues with fusion, which will speed up the time of getting that sort of clean energy source off the ground. I'm very excited about a project that I have in mind of using AI with our deep stack of data

to understand where all of life is. So we don't... What does that mean? Well, just like, where is all the biodiversity? Where are all the different species? What's the... And what are the... How's that changing over time?

We don't have a model of where all the life is on the earth. It's pretty crude. It's based on a few point places where people have done deep surveys and then guesstimates for a lot of other things in other places. So a more granular understanding of all the biodiversity across the planet. We've got all this data. AI is really good at crunching those sort of things. We should be doing them together. There's so much upside.

Now, I fear at the same time, it's obviously driving more energy use, but more. Or over, it is also driving more efficiency across all these different sectors. And humans tend to use efficiency, not for doing the same thing with less, but do more. And so we are AI, by default, I think the sociological system of the planet will leverage AI to accelerate blowing up the planetary boundaries, unless we get smart on the planet. that or get smart in how we apply AI. So it's not just one where, of course, we want to maximize the good and minimize the harm, sort of like you do with any technology. I think the default use is more likely to drive more negative than positive on vis-a-vis the environment. Because it's

downstream from the operating system, which is profits, tethered to energy tech or tethered to ecosystem impact. 100%. So obviously, I don't have crystal ball. I can't. But that would seem the most likely outcome. So I think that therefore means that it's incumbent on all of the people focusing on AI to be even more proactive with how that technology is used. To steer it towards those ecological cases and steer it away from those cases where it's just going to speed up our blowing through the planetary boundaries. And to do that, we need people to be aware of what's happening as one of the steps. Yeah. And the great thing about AI, though, is that it will help us learn that as we go in real time. If AI is good at something, it's learning. And so it has a fantastic ability to do that. But it won't happen on its own. It will take an active intervention on the part of the people developing that technology and the users of it for that to happen, in my opinion. It's going to take active stewardship.

God, if I worked here, I would have so many questions, especially if I had a, an AI intern, like questions about the world, like show me Colombia in a time lapse or where I live in the Midwest or what's happened to the Great Lakes or like there's so many questions. It would be fascinating. So I think what you're getting at there is towards a vision we've talked about. So our first mission was image the whole world every day. Yeah. And make that data accessible and actionable.

Now, for the last bit, we've imaged. imaging all the world every day with the satellites, but accessible and actionable is limited, as I mentioned, by tools. I think AI can really help us to expand that. Now, we talk about a vision here called querable Earth, which is where you have an AI interface to all this imagery, where you can ask any question like the ones that you were just asking, and it can just give a semantic answer

or show you the images or the time lapse, and help you want to understand it, and that that could be something that anyone could leverage. We're not quite there yet, but it has got dramatically more plausible to get to that, given these large foundation models, just in the last year. And that, so I'm very excited.

So last year we spent a big effort in the company focused on expanding our space business, topic perhaps less relevant to your clients to your to your listeners but this year our big focus is on AI applied to our data to democratize it more

I feel that life is incredibly precious on this planet and every month that I get older I see it more and I feel compelled to do something facts changing people's value systems which is what planet is trying to do is part of it but

how did seeing all this data punch you in the gut on how rare life is in the universe? Just did the aerial from outer space looking at the planet's sort of overview effect? Or like what happened in you personally with that question? Yeah, I mean,

I think that life is inherently valuable and when you look out into the cosmos and see how rare it is, that only makes you 10x that. Our data makes you feel that a little bit more viscerally because you can see it happening day to day and you can see the scale of it and you can see how quickly it is happening. And that adds a tremendous amount of urgency. Personally, I also just spent a lot of time in nature and I think that that helps me be connected with nature. and I think in the modern era we've become less and less connected with nature. And it's like we've tried to think we're separate from nature.

And that's just a complete fallacy, right? We are absolutely coupled, even in the modern era. We're fundamentally dependent on nature. And this is what I'm saying about the climate versus biodiversity. And obviously we need to work on both of those things and all of the environmental challenges of the earth. But just ask a child what they care about. And it is so native and intuitive to care about life.

And adults, too, spend a month in nature. You know after a month in nature that humans belong there. It just, you just know. You fit in there. You don't fit in in a concrete building. That's not where we're natively meant to be. And when you are in surrounded by nature, you feel a part of it. You don't just feel a separate entity like we feel in our cities.

So this divorce from nature, which comes back from philosophical mistakes that started having centuries ago, the Abrahamic religions in particular enforce this idea of humans being above nature. That's been a real fundamental philosophical error. We are part of nature. And that's both practical and true. And the more we think of ourselves as part of nature, the more it's obvious that you need to. to protect it. And just to put it in straight economic terms, because some people don't appreciate the sort of airy-fairy language, half of our economy will collapse immediately if we didn't have the rest of

nature. Well, no, 100% would. Well, 100% would. I mean, yeah, it depends exactly how you calculate it, but there's these so-called nature-based services and roughly half the economy is dependent on these nature-based services. That's cleaning our water, cleaning our air, doing these things. We do not have machines that can take over that role. This is not a tiny, aspect of connection with nature and it's out in the countryside and our cities work without it, it is a complete coupling. And people don't see that because they're not in it. But as soon as you're in nature for a while, it becomes obvious. So that disconnection, I hope, well, I think that's the key thing we have to overcome. Well, I deeply feel that your company can play a role in

broadening people's awareness and feeling about this. Like I feel, I feel that. I feel that. I feel the truth of that. But I do think you need to have, I mean, you're a businessman. You have a company. You have 900 employees. I mean, you have to pay the bills. You have to earn something from your investments. But shouldn't there be like a daily thing that people in the world can come and look at new things every week, new time lapses, new information, even school children or something, like carve out some, some aspect of this effort that is for a public, information consumption. Do you have that now and do you plan on doing it? I think it's a great piece of intuition and I definitely feel the same.

Sam and Sam and Samans, you know, we definitely have a lot of universities as I mentioned and a lot of NGOs here's our data and we give a data to media organizations that need it when they need it and so on, but not nearly as much as we need to and should. We had a big goal last year of getting to profitability of a particular metric, EBITA profitability. And I think, you know, once you get there, it becomes much easier to have a little bit more focus on projects that help the world like that. And, and as I mentioned, AI is coming along and making it much easier to get that. And so watch this space this year. I think the combination of AI and our data will help democratize that that ability for, you know,

everyday users to get value out of our data that's otherwise today quite complicated. And that is going to be a potential tool. I can't guarantee everyone's going to use it. But it's going to be a potential tool that a lot of people could get value out of. I will watch that space. And just a comment on the EBITDA. EBITDA stands for earnings before interest debt and amortization. Tax and taxes.

What if we redefine the boundaries there, because we measure all that in money. But if we add social capital, built capital, ecological capital, natural capital, and the pro-social, like, human aggregation, and we include our profits measured in those things, then tools like this would really, really become important.

Our company would be wildly profitable today, wildly profitable if we could possibly take this into account because, you know, if you help reduce deforestation, And across 64 countries, which we're working in right now on deforestation, even a tiny bit, like a percent reduction in deforestation, that would pay for planet. If we widen the boundary of the definition of EBITDA, you might be one of the most profitable companies in the world. I would like to think so. I've often said Planet is a multi-billion dollar business and a multi-trillion dollar impact business.

And I think that's, I think that sustainability is a huge business area as well. as doing good and those things are aligned. If we can do a carbon credit system that helps us go from billion-dollar carbon projects to trillion-dollar transition of our global economy, and we help, the more we help, the more we do well and the planet does well, that's great, right? And so it's not a little thing. This is a multi-trillion-dollar transition of the economy. But if you just measure on impact terms, I think that's much more significant.

And that's why we're a public benefit corporation. We went public as a public benefit corporation because we believe it's more than just the financials that matter. And I continue to believe that. I think ultimately all companies should be public benefit corporations. You're the first person that's mentioned that on the podcast. Could you clarify for people what that means? Yeah, it's a change of your legal statutes to have that basically you can write your mission. statement into the charter of the company. It's like the DNA of the company. And it changes it to be

caring. It cares about shareholders, but it also cares about other things like your clients, your employees, your ecosystem, and your mission, and above all to your mission. And our mission is basically using space to help life on earth. And so that becomes not just, a matter of a company mission statement on your website, it becomes the fiduciary duty of the directors to maximize that. And so it's a complex amalgamation of these goals and that's critical. The world isn't black and white. It isn't just about dollars and cents. It's about how your responsible interaction with the world. It's about helping positive impact. And yes, about dollars and cents. I think we have a business model where those two things are

strongly aligned. And so that's that's what you want is a business model where you can do good and do well. Are there any new success stories or new projects that you're particularly proud of or can share with us? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. So we've been talking a lot about AI. We just did a partnership with Anthropic where we're looking to fine tune their Claude model using our satellite data because these models have generally not seen much satellite data. So it's kind of exciting to think how good they could get. They're already quite good out of the box looking at satellite data. They can analyze it and figure things out, which is tantalizing to the thing of democratizing value of this, if you could just chat and interface with it. But it's even, it could get much more

accurate if you train it with lots of data. So we're partnering with Anthropic on that. It's very exciting. Also, I mentioned the new satellite we have, Tanager, that can see these emissions, where we just announced a partnership with, that's a consortium with NASA JPL and Carbon Mapper, we're helping an NGO, we're helping the state of California monitor methane leaks across all of California on a monthly basis to get ahead of those leaks and help all the operators of oil and gas facilities, waste facilities, agricultural facilities get ahead of that. I think it's an incredible example of how governments can leverage smart tech to do a smart environmental regulation quickly.

So it's not just the oil and gas companies where the methane leaks. There's other like landfills and things like that. Yes, those are the three main facilities, things that create methane leaks. It's the cows in the farms. It's the waste facilities where there's rotting stuff and the methane comes off and there's the gas leaks themselves. And that's a $95 million contract over three years to this consortium. So it shows that there's a real business there.

And that's not, of course, perhaps the most interesting thing to your listeners, but it's important because it costs us money to build up these satellites. And so we need to keep paying for it to have those better systems, to be able to continue to have smarter systems to help take care of the planet. So you mentioned the different color filters that our eyes just have a few, but your things have a lot. So if you have an aerial view of California at some level of granularity,

the dairy and CAFOs must have this huge plumes over them using your filters? Yeah. Like disgustingly huge. We detect those. And I mentioned what the one I mentioned and showed you earlier, that was 7,000 kilograms of methane per hour.

That was an oil, a gas leak. and yeah, it's totally stupid. We can fix those things. Nobody wants that. Yeah, and this image, by the way, is a false color where we have the near-infrared. All of our satellites, all 200 have a near-infrared filter, and that actually tells you,

we can actually discover from this over time crop type and crop yield. So that's what we use on all of our satellites already, but this has 400 different color bands. So just imagine there's 420 layers, to every image of all these different colors. Incredible data to really scientifically understand what's going on. It's impressive.

So what can the people watching this, listening to this, that are interested in like, I want to find out more, I want to see their data or use their data. Like, well, how can people get more involved in this, become aware of it? Well, so you can obviously go to our website, planet.com. It's pretty simple to remember. and there are, if you're a business, there are ways of getting involved with the university, there are ways of getting involved and getting access to their data. We are trying to make that easier, as I mentioned, with just simple ways of getting access.

We are as a business focused more on the big clients that we are serving, companies, governments, and non-profits. But in time, I think AI and these tools would enable it to be much more. to more people. And it's very much my desire that we democratize access to the imagery and the value that can be extracted from it. If you have a few more minutes, I have some typical questions. I ask all my guests, if you don't mind. So we have some common friends that care about the meta-crisis, the human predicament. Personally, do you have advice to people that are watching on how to engage or prepare being alive at these times? Do you have advice?

Well, it's choppy waters right now, obviously, and I think it's going to be choppier in the next few years. I always believe there's opportunity and disaster, so you have to look for that. I think it's a simple adage, but if you really look, they really always are, we've got to fundamentally have smarter systems of social governance. You were talking to Audrey Tang recently. That is a hopeful proposition for how we lay on top of democracy, a way of smarter, coming to smarter consensus decisions on new technology as it comes, you know, digital democracy, democracy tools. And that is the kind of, and then the hope in my mind

is that, as I said, next generation is increasingly aware of these issues and we can have a phase change of human behavior at some point towards more ecologically smart ways of acting in the I would love to have you and Audrey and like Tristan Harris in a roundtable conversation. This episode will air after Audrey Tang's episode, but if you could just speculate on what Audrey talks about with the open society technology that her group are working on, how would that merge with AI and with planet? Is there like, how could that all be merged? Well, I think that one of the challenges we face in the internet era is that,

that information spreads very fast and misinformation can spread even faster, and we have a challenge of what's true and not. We can't get a head straight on who won the election or where the vaccines work or... Well, so far, your data can't be fake, though. There are no deep fakes of planet stuff. Correct. Although we have to be careful about that. But I think that's getting to my point, is that satellite data is one component of helping to triangulate truth. When you have multiple perspectives, literally multiple perspectives, but also, you know, you have a cell camera here and you have someone's point of view from that angle and then the satellite data from this angle, it becomes harder to fake things. So whilst social media and AI has tended to drive more

misinformation online, I believe our tool fundamentally can help us cohere more collective understanding of where we're at in the planet. because satellite pictures don't lie. It's, it's, it's, you can, you can put hashtagging in and other things to ensure that no one manipulates the data and we do. And then people can, uh, check themselves what the facts are and coordinate. And it becomes a different way of us trying. And having a common understanding of reality is going to be even more critical in these next

I agree. I agree. So just sitting in the hallway waiting for you, I was passed by lots of, of young people who work at Planet, how would you change your advice to young humans in their 20s or becoming aware of all the things going on do advice for young people?

Well, obviously there's hope and opportunity as well as challenges that we face. I think my advice would be a few things. One is connect with nature. As a young person, I like spending time in cities and increasingly realize that I always liked hiking outside, But increasingly I realize that our disconnection from nature is probably one of the core challenges humanity is facing. And if you just spend more time in nature, you get that.

And it's, guess what? It's free. You know, it really doesn't cost anything. And it gives you so much reward in return. And it gives you a sense of what it's worth fighting for, which is the beautiful planet and nature that we sit on is irreplaceable. And I would also say, community.

You know, form communities of like-minded people that care about issues and work together on solving things because in community you can do more. Even small communities can do a lot, right? That adage, you know, never doubt that a small group of people can change the world because, in fact, it's only a small group of people that have changed the world, in fact. It's true, right? So, and behavior change is, can happen very quick. humanity has flipped on many issues like smoking and others that we discussed earlier.

Literally in a few years you can go from everyone smoking to no one smoking in bars in in whole regions of the world. And it's kind of crazy how fast humans can change behavior. So we've got to change our behavior in a few key areas. You know, diets, one of them. I often talk about this, that if an alien came down to the earth and discovered that we were spending 60% of our agricultural land, the size of Canada, the United States and China combined on one source of food that gives us less than 5% of our nutritional value, that is beef, they would go,

what the heck are you smoking? Or that 96% of the weight of all the animals on Earth are humans and our farm animals. Yeah, and the rest, the four, now three, unfortunately, percent is all of the rest of mammals. Yeah. It's insane, right? It's an incredibly insane use of resources, especially since it's agriculture that's driving deforestation and overfishing that's driving biodiversity loss in the oceans. That's a diet choice. You know, that's a crazy simple choice to significantly reduce your impact on the environment. Like there's a 10x for the having there make no problem. So, okay, let's, you know, and it doesn't mean even having to stop having me entirely.

Just reduce it. It's not that hard. And yet it can have a 10x impact on reducing our driving of biodiversity to destruction. That's the dominant source of biodiversity law. You should, again, getting back to the EBITDA constraint that you have as the co-founder of this organization. But you could make so many cool little mini-documentary things. where on the one side of the screen you show the deforestation. On the other side, you show just giant cafos and livestock farms,

like simultaneous imagery, like really emotionally impactful stuff. Like millions. Here where it was the forest and here's the new cows that's taken up the forest. But you could do millions of those things. Yeah. Maybe make it relevant to people's local area so that they know it's around the corner, not just, yeah. I think I should probably work here because I have a lot of ideas. I'm working, you can be our chief marketing officer.

Yeah. So I probably know the answer to this, but I ask all my guests. What do you care most about in the world, Will? I care about life. I mean, you've heard it throughout this discussion. You know, I also care about how the universe works. I mean, constantly intrigued with things to do with cosmology and consciousness and how it arose and, you know, scientific questions.

But most of all, it's nature and community. And that's why that was my advice to younger folks. If you could change one thing and had a magic wand and change one thing that there would be no personal recourse to you or your reputation or anything to improve human and planetary futures, what would it be? Wow. Something to do with navigating through the AI challenges that are coming upon us

in the next couple of years. tremendous opportunity, tremendous peril. And how do we as a species navigate that safely? If I could wave a magic one, then we get through that safely and give birth to our progeny, which is, I think, what we're doing, de facto, is an incredible time to be alive, but it is unclear how we're going to navigate that. It's harder and harder to see even just a couple of years into the future what's going to happen because of AI. It's changing everything, every single discipline.

And I've said recently there's sort of three contact moments coming very soon. We might discover life off Earth because we've now got all these planets to look for life around. And we have now a new generation of telescopes that can see their atmospheres. And if they can detect using spectra that is lots of oxygen, you know that there's probably life there because there's no simple geological mechanism for choosing oxygen. So suddenly we will probably, because I don't think life is likely to be only on planet, we will probably discover life in the next 10 years.

Secondly, we will probably decode species communication, you know, the work of ASEA and Earth Species Project and other efforts like that. That's amazing. And then, of course, there's giving birth to AI, superintelligence ourselves. We're generating technologically a silicon superintelligence. And all three of those things would be massive moments,

and we're going to see all three of them potentially in this decade. And they're all decenturing moments. They're Copernicus moments in that they make humans less the center of everything. Just like Copernicus realized that the earth was not the center of the solar system, when we realize there's life off Earth or see the way, are actually chatting about each other and have complex dynamics and sociology and so do the grillers and so do the octopus or whatever and when we have to deal with the fact that the AI might want its own rights all three of those things are Copernicus level moments that we're facing

what an incredible time to be alive firstly that we're going through this but the AI one represents the most challenging existential risks for humanity. It can solve all the challenges we face, and it can blow us up just as much. And steering through that, it is not clear how we do it. There's a race dynamic between countries, China, the US, between companies, OpenAI, Google, and Topic all the like. And it seems everything's to play for, so it seems existential to them. and so they're racing, even though they know all of them admit that there's these significant dangers.

It's kind of crazy, that dichotomy, that they recognize these dangers and yet they're stepping on the gas because they don't want to lose the game because it's existential, who wins? Well, how do we navigate that? I haven't seen a good answer to that,

and I don't mean to be over-alarmist, but I don't mean to say it's all rosy either. So I think it's somewhere in the middle, but that's a tricky navigation for humanity, definitely the most tricky one we've faced. I mean, it makes nuclear weapons look like a child's play, you know, as a moment. It really is a profound time to be alive. And the phase shift from really narrow boundary to wider boundary views of those three events that you said is what's happening during our time.

And your company is documenting it with daily snapshots of what's happening on the world. This has been really fascinating. I'm not an expert on this and seeing your factory where you're building the satellites and how impressive everything is. It was really eye-opening to me. So thank you for your time and for your work. And do you have any closing comments for our viewers? No, I just say that there's massive opportunity to take care of this planet very swiftly. And so we need everyone all hands.

on that. Thanks so much, Will. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, and Lizzie Siriani.