The Vergecast - Work from anywhere: sailboats, solar generators, and Starlink

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

David Pierce hosts a special "work from anywhere" episode of The Vergecast while he is on vacation. 02:33 - CEO of Rove Jonah Hanig chats about his approach work-friendly travel. Reflect's Alex MacCaw shares his experience working from a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. 17:12 - Verge deputy editor Thomas Ricker talks about his review of the Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, as well as his experience of working remotely in Europe. 36:28 - Verge policy editor Russell Brandom and senior reporter Loren Grush discuss the state of using satellites like Starlink to access the internet in rural areas. Further reading: Starlink’s Dishy McFlatface internet now available for Boaty McBoatfaces — just $5,000 per month Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro review: letting flex-workers flex Starlink RV review: the dawn of space internet to go Ventje VW Campervan review: 'work from home' from anywhere How Starlink and other satellite services are changing the shape of the internet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Pockable Solar Panels. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently walking by the Atlantic Ocean in Miami Beach, Florida, because I'm a crypto billionaire and I live here now. No, I'm kidding. I'm on vacation, even though I'm kind of working and also making this podcast. So vacation and air quotes, I guess. That's maybe not great work-life balance, but actually work-life balance on places like the Atlantic Ocean is a lot of what we're going to be talking about in this episode.

Today on the show, we're going to dig into how homes all. over the world are being renovated to make it easier for you to work from anywhere and into what work life looks like even when you're a digital nomad. We're also going to talk to Lauren Grush and Russell Brandom about space internet and specifically why it seems like Starlink, One Web, and a bunch of other companies are so desperate to spend billions of dollars putting satellites into space. And we're going to talk to Thomas Ricker about solar panels, big batteries, van life, and what it looks like to be off the grid and on the grid at the same time. All of that's coming up in just a second. First, I'm going to go dry off and get out of this hot sun.

Fun travel tip, by the way, they now make sunscreen that you roll on kind of like a deodorant stick. Super handy. Big fan. It's the only reason I'm not a total lobster at this moment. Anyway, this is the Vergecast. See in a second. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. To explain the thing I want to talk about now, I have to go back to this March. I went to Utah to visit a friend and go skiing. We spent the first couple of days in Salt Lake City just skiing the amount. mountains around there. And then the last night of the weekend, we went to Park City. After I left,

another set of his friends was coming in, and their plan was to spend the whole next week working and skiing and skiing and working. Park City is this stupendously fancy ski town, so the place we got was not surprisingly really nice. It was about a block off the main road, right up a hill, and it had this super steep driveway that would definitely become basically impossible if it got too snowy. The house was huge. It had these floraes, floor to ceiling windows, there was a hot tub in the back, there was a whole room just for a ping pong table. It was like a ski chalet you'd see in a movie. But the thing that jumped out to me the most was that in almost every single room of the house, there was a full-size desk, like a sit-stand

desk, with a monitor and mouse and keyboard and a surprisingly large number of dongles and cables everywhere. I could just sit down, plug in my laptop, and be done. It was like being in a super homey co-working space. It was awesome. And I've been thinking about it ever since, honestly, because in this new remote work-friendly world, the question is, if you can work from literally anywhere, how do you do it? What's your setup? And that is really what this whole episode is about. And as we've discovered, it all starts with two things, connectivity and power. If you don't have those, you don't have anything. So we're going to talk a lot more about both those things in this episode. But when we started doing this episode, I found that place in Park City again, which

turned out to be managed by a company called Rove that's actually trying to build a whole company around this kind of work-friendly travel. So I called up Jonah Hainig, Roe's CEO, to see what's going on here. And Jonah told me he started the company after staying in a bunch of Airbnbs during the early days of the pandemic that just didn't work for this kind of lifestyle. Around time during COVID, I was traveling with my co-founders and my last company and a few other friends staying in different Airbnb's and just had this experience that a lot of other people probably had, which was I loved working remotely. I saw that as the future of work, but all the properties we were staying at were not remote work friendly. They were very

challenging to work out of, especially for groups. Jonah described Rove to me as basically a hotel brand for single family homes, which means essentially that they work with property owners to upgrade their place in Roeve style. Every Roeve property has the same towels and bedsheets and the same blender, and he said the same work setups. We put workstations in the homes. We do typically a standing desk, current Miller chair, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. You know, we'll try and do at least a workstation per bedroom to really make it accessible for the number of people that would stay at the property to all be on Zoom calls at

the same time or, you know, to have multiple people working from the house, especially during the week. The biggest thing Roeve makes sure to upgrade, though, is also sort of the obvious thing. It's the Wi-Fi. So it's not just the speed of the Wi-Fi. but it's actually the coverage of the house. I think a lot of the issues that people run into are magnified when you're with a group, you know, essentially at a typical Airbnb, which is why I think it's a little bit more of an issue at Airbnb's than hotels.

Because, you know, you might be at a property with fast Wi-Fi, but if you go upstairs to the upstairs bedroom and there's no Wi-Fi extender, then if it doesn't work in that bedroom, it doesn't matter. And then if there's no desk or place to sit in that bedroom, you end up taking the call from, you know, sitting on the bed and it just makes for an awkward and uncomfortable and unreliable. screens. Jonah didn't really want to talk about the specific brands and stuff that Rove uses, but I can tell you that at least in Park City, I had a Logitech webcam, a Logitech mouse, and a Logitech keyboard. There was a big monitor on an arm. I can't remember the brand, unfortunately, but it was big. And there was a USBC hub, a light for the webcam, and a bunch of

random cables and dongles. I really could just sit down, plug my laptop in, and I had a full work-from-home set up as good as the one I have at home. It was awesome. And it did make me wonder, how far can you take this idea? Can we get to a point where there's just going to be a desk in every hotel, every Airbnb, every, I don't know, tent in the woods so that you can work and play at the same time? And since I am who I am and this show is what it is, I wondered what gear do you need to buy to actually make all of that work? To answer that question at the absolute extreme of where it might go. Let me introduce you to Alex McCaw. I knew that I wanted to live and work on a boat. Alex was the CEO of a company called Clearbit until he decided he didn't want to be

CEO anymore. Instead, he decided to start building a note-taking app called Reflect. And then he decided to do it from a sailboat. Sailing gives you some things. It also takes away some things. What it gives to you is ultimate freedom. You are out there and anchor. on the water, every night you see an incredible sunset. You're right there in nature. It's so peaceful. And whenever you get a bit too hot, you can just go for a swim.

It is just an incredible experience. It's not for everyone. You know, there are a lot of drawbacks. Like, for example, getting fresh food is a major issue and fast connectivity is a pain. But for me, the ultimate freedom of just saying, okay, I like this place, but I'm gonna pick another spot on the map and just,

put up the sails and go there. That, for me, is worth all the hassle, and it's just an incredible way of living. Alex spent almost all of the last year on a 52-foot catamaran that he helped design and customize, sailing it across the Atlantic and then around the Caribbean. I set sail in January of this year when I sailed from Cape Town across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and then I've been working and living on that boat ever since. except very recently when hurricane season started. Now I'm based in New York until the end of the set of hurricane season.

I asked him what he thought the most important parts of his setup were, the things you really need to work from a boat successfully. And he, again, said the obvious things, connectivity and electricity. When it comes to electricity, the answer is batteries. Big, unwieldy lithium-ion batteries that recharge either through solar panels or through a converter connected to the boat's engine. You can power your fridges off it or the nav equipment. You can power the kettle.

You can power all the sockets. You can just plug in a laptop charger and it just works. And that goes pretty much all off the solar panels. Now they only obviously work when it's sunny. As soon as there's a cloud in the sky, then the performance goes to almost negligible. And as soon as they're covered by any kind of shadow as well, let's say you have the sales up.

Again, the performance suffers. You need backups to solar. We basically have some generators attached to the engine called integrals. Again, a completely new technology, but that takes excess power off the engine and puts that into the lithium batteries. The connectivity part of things, though, is both more complicated and way hackier. So connectivity, it's surprising how much the world has 4G and 5G. So the Caribbean has a lot of 4G and 5G now.

So when you are within visual site of an island, you can typically pick up a signal. I have a system installed that turns our mast into basically a giant aerial. And that can pick up mobile phone signals. And then I have a little router and a SIM card, slot, and so forth. So that creates a local Wi-Fi network. And then anyone on the boat can just connect to that. and then they can get 4G 5G.

Now the problem with that is getting SIM cards, data usage. There's complexities around that, different Sims working in different locations. I've kind of hacked it with Google Fi, and you're not really meant to do this. Google really doesn't like when you do this, apparently. Alex's Fi account eventually got shut off. He also said even when it works, it's really slow, just a few megabits down most of the time he's on the water. So for this year, when he's back on the boat, I bet you can guess his upgrade plan. Yep, it's Starlink.

When I was building the boat, I actually put a satellite pole at the back of the boat that is just right now a bare platform. The idea is it's ready for Starlink when Starlink is available for boats. They've taken a while to get it available, but now they've got the RV version of Starlink. And then they also have a very expensive boat version. It's very expensive because they are trying to... to compete with the existing satellite providers. So I think I'm just going to try the RV version and see if that works. Alex and I had been talking for a while.

Before I realized, I still couldn't picture what it was like to actually work a nine to five from your boat in the middle of the ocean. You have batteries, great. You have half decent internet, terrific. What's an average Tuesday like on the boat? You wake up, make sure the boat's still floating, then what? I check the weather, hop out of bed, usually straight dive in the water, swim around the boat a few times, and then I've got an outside shower. And then it's time for breakfast. We have an induction hob and settle, and so I'll just fry something up.

And then it's time for work. So it depends if I'm hosting people on the boat or not. But let's just say I'm doing a normal day of work on Reflect. I've got a MacBook Pro. I got the big one because I knew that. I wouldn't be able to have a monitor on the boat because it would just fall over. So I got the big MacBook and I just sit at my desk in the cockpit just coding away. I asked if he had a mouse and keyboard to go along with this or if that would all just fall away too. And he was kind of like, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, I would say keyboard and mouse would be, I could probably get away with that.

And maybe a temporary stand, actually. These are all great ideas that I should have thought of that you're giving me. But the monitor would definitely fall over at smash. The thing about this setup is that at the end of it, it's not all that unusual, right? I sit at home all day and still what I need is internet, power, and a decent computer, and everything else's gravy. What Alex said is that actually the much bigger change to make this lifestyle work was in how he thinks about his schedule, not his gear. I think the only way to do it is to design your life around having no meetings. I have very, very, very few meetings every week.

Most people can't do this, obviously. Reflect the note-taking app that he's building is three people. It's a new company and it's run totally asynchronously. This is not a lifestyle that's conducive to every job. I certainly would not be able to pull it off. But when I asked Alex if he'd ever think about going back to a more normal job and schedule, he kind of laughed at me. For me, I'm never going to do it again.

I do not like meetings at all, especially obviously. I have to say, I hung up my call with Alex and then just kind of sat there staring at my calendar. I have a laptop. I technically work remotely. Maybe all I need to do is just cancel all my meetings and get on a boat? I don't know. For now, I'm trying this poolside thing in Miami for a few days. We'll see if that's good enough.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. and then we're going to come back to talk about another person's work from anywhere set up. And that person is the verge zone Thomas Ricker, who has been testing and experimenting with more outdoorsy work from home gear than anyone I know. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along?

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If you read The Verge a lot, you probably, I probably have noticed that Thomas Ricker, a deputy editor on our team, has been writing about and reviewing a long series of what I guess I would classify as outdoorsy gadgets. Lots of solar panels, lots of e-bikes, a whole camper van at one point. Dude is just out here finding work reasons to be outdoors, and honestly, I really respect it. One of the things that most jumped out to me was his review of a product called the Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, which is a terrible name, and basically looks. like an all-in-one power situation that might solve some of the power and electricity problems

that come with this work from anywhere life. So I grabbed Thomas to talk about it and the rest of his awesomely outdoorsy work life. Hi, Thomas. Hi, David. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for doing this. I know podcasting is not your favorite. Very happy you're here. Yeah, it's okay. This is something I'm actually got some passion behind. So let's see how it goes. Yeah, so to that point, I should tell you before we get into this that I have decided to appoint you at the Vergecast's official van life correspondent, which I think is a title you can put in your business card, and I hope you're okay with that. No, that's great. I've actually just taken on the beat without asking anybody without talking to our editor-in-chief, Nelai,

and, you know, that's just the way it works at the Verge. We have complete flexibility to do what we want, pursue our passions and our readers respond, so that's good. I just really respect that you were like, okay, how can I do my job, but also be in the woods all the time? And you crushed it. It was perfect. Well, I've been working remote for like 20 years. So this is the problem. Everybody defines it as working from home. But working from home really means working from anywhere.

And that's the thing I've been trying to explore more and more of. My wife, she's been tied to the office for a while, but she just got a new job. And now she can work from anywhere. So the idea of like doing that from a van, doing it off grid in the cabin in the woods. I mean, I'm in northern Europe, right? I've got easy access to Norway and Sweden. And, like, remote escapes are left, right. everywhere. So the fact that I'm not pursuing that, the fact that I'm sitting here in an office

in the center of Amsterdam is kind of crazy. That is fair. So, and I want to get into the specifics of this. So you recently reviewed the Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, which is a hilarious name. But before we get into that thing, I want to talk about the picture that's in your review. And I'll put the story in the show notes because everyone should see this picture. It's a person sitting in this like very comfortable, furry looking chair next to a very nice, like wood wicker. looking ottoman on their laptop. Looks like they're having a lovely time. And then like eight feet away, there is a big Starlink satellite dish and two big solar panels

and then a giant ass battery. And I'm just looking at this picture. And what I really want to know, like, is this your actual life? Like, do you go to the beach on the weekends and this is the Thomas Ricker setup? I mean, yes, kind of. It is the glamorized Instagram version of it, right? Just as when Jack re announced this, they showed a tent, six giant solar panels and this young woman crouching next to it as if she backpacked 150 pounds worth of gear into the mountains

to, I don't know, go into full God mode in nature. But, I mean, it is true. I do work from the beach quite a bit. I have enough wattage there. We have an actual power hookup. But, you know, I just went to Germany, for example, in a van, and that review is coming up on the verge soon. But I took a jackery with me. Now, I didn't take six solar panels with me because I'm not insane. The thing is built around the concept of being portable and dragging six of these nearly 20-pound panels around isn't really feasible in the battery itself weighs, what was it, 45 pounds or something. So, you know, even 90 pounds where the gear is a lot, but at least these 200-watt panels, you know, you can pick up one in the left hand, one in the right, and you can

walk that into a field. So, you know, I took it into a field. We part, we were completely off-grid. I had the Starlink. I had my solar panel recharging the power I was usage, that I was using, rather. Starlink uses about 42 watts. These 200-watt panels in full sun get about 170 watts. So I had the Starlink. I had a laptop. I had my phones charging. That's still less than the amount of power that those panels were pumping back into the battery. So the battery stayed 100% charged and I was getting free energy off the grid. That's pretty hard to argue. So why this Jackery thing? Like I confess to knowing nothing about this space. Like is this thing from Jackery, which is a sort of they do power of all kinds is basically all I know about the company. I have like a little portable cell phone battery

from Jackery. But are they doing something interesting and unusual in this space? Well, that cell phone, like that, the power bank that you have, this is about 50 times the capacity of that. And if you think about the, what is it, the Ford Lightning, I don't know anything about trucks. The truck that everybody drives in America. That thing's about 50 times the size of this battery, just to give you an idea of scale. But what Jackery is doing is they put an MPTT controller. I'm not going to to get into the tech of that, but they put it into this large battery. And so it can convert solar power efficiently enough that it makes it worthwhile to do, right? So, I mean, they started with the smaller batteries, then they moved up to the, I think they call them power stations.

That's the big-ass battery that everybody knows about. They have competitors like Anchor and Ecoflow, Goal Zero. You see these things around. But yeah, now they've added the solar panels and they're calling this a generator. Now, when you think generator, you think of these noisy gas generators, maybe you see them at festivals, powering food trucks, or you have one in your garage in the event of emergencies, right? So normally when there's an emergency, there's like a storm, a tornado, I don't know what, but you don't have clear visibility to the skies. That's like the whole problem. That's the whole problem. So yes, this is a generator. And yes, if you have six of these panels and you have a place to put them and they're at 90 degree angles to the sun, you can charge this battery in two and a half hours.

But that requires a lot of things lining up, which isn't going to happen in an emergency. So if you really need a generator, you don't want this. If you need an emergency generator, you definitely need something that runs off a diesel or gas, and you have a can't of it next to you so you can keep topping that thing up as long as you need it until a power comes back. But if you really need something that's renewable, clean, super quiet, right? You don't have that motor running. That's going to renew itself over about nine hours.

That's what it took me in real-time testing. then you could conceivably use this at your tiny house in the woods and your hashtag van life. I could use it at the beach. You could use it in the park with friends. If you're powering your, or you take it to a job site. It could power a battery power drill for like 60 hours. That's before, you know, it's being replenished with the solar power. So there is definitely a space for this.

It's not something for everybody. But the nice thing is, and I didn't even write about this in the review, because I forgot to mention it. It can act as a UPS. So even when you're not using it, not when you're taking, when you're not taking, when you're not taking it on the road, you could just have it sitting under your desk and you have your computer plugged into it. So if there is a power out, at least the computer stays up, maybe your router stays up. Who knows? That's really interesting. So to that point, actually, the price of this is a thing I've been trying to figure out because like this,

this Jackery setup is relatively expensive. And then you've also written about like the Starlink RV stuff, which is pretty expensive. And then there's like the Starlink on the boat thing, which is like five grand a month. And so part of what I'm trying to figure out is like, who is all of this for? Like, we haven't really reached a point where, like, regular person is going to, like, buy this solar array, keep it in the trunk and work from the beach. I don't know, are we, like, three steps away from that? Are we one step away from that? Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a complicated equation that everybody has to work out for themselves. I mean, I have dabbled with the idea of entering van life. You know, we're kind of looking around it and Mercedes-Benz Sprinter and building

it out from scratch. But then if you're doing that, if you're living in a van, then maybe you're renting out your home, right? And maybe you're renting it for more than you're paying for your mortgage. So what is the cost of that freedom that devices like this give you? And you don't have to quit your regular job. One of the things I've been writing about is the fact that since COVID-19, those flexible work arrangements have become permanent. And there was a study by McKinsey recently, and they say 92 million American workers now have the opportunity to work remotely, and 80 million of them currently do. That's an incredible number. And it does different. I mean, if you're rich and you're young and you work in tech, you have an even greater chance of doing that. But even according to this

survey, 47% of people earning between 25 and 49,000 a year also have the opportunity to do flex work. So, you know, I mean, what does that escape worth to you? That's a price that everybody, that's personal to everybody. That's fair. So tell me about the amount of work associated to this. Because, like, to your point, like, I buy this 45-pound battery and these six 20-pound solar panels. I have to move them around. Even you in your review, it seems like at one point got tired of trying to, like, correctly position this thing. And it strikes me as like, these things are like cool and useful and handy, but also just, like, a lot of work.

Is it a lot of work? I mean, life changes when you're, when you're remote. If you're living off grid, like, making dinner becomes more complicated, right? If you're building off a fire or whatever. So it becomes much more. intentional. So yeah, you might have to reposition the solar panels if you're trying to optimize input. You could, of course, just lay them flat or, you know, there's plenty of sites that will tell you what the optimum angle is to put them so you can just leave them in one place and it'll

follow the, or, you know, when the sun crosses the sky, it'll maximize the use of those panels. But, I mean, these things are dumb. It doesn't get any, this thing doesn't even have an app. There's no way to monitor it remotely. It has a small display. If moving panels, and if you only have two of them to stay portable. If you can't do that, then maybe, you know, Van Life or living off grid isn't for you. That's fair. Yeah, it just strikes me as this, it's a really interesting thing because on the one hand, I think part of what you see and you look at like Van stuff on Instagram and it's like everything is very simple, right? And it's like, you don't have to think about all the sort of trappings of being a person inside of a society. And that sounds

very appealing. But then it's like, oh, how do I charge my phone and make dinner? And the answer to That is suddenly like six times more complicated. And it just feels like we have definitely not solved all of those tradeoffs. But then I look at this picture of you on the beach and I'm like, okay, maybe it's worth the tradeoffs. Yeah. And it's true. I mean, there are other things you have to consider when you're, you know, living in the woods. I mean, of course you could spend even more money, right?

I reviewed this robot that takes your panels and keeps them directed at the sun for the entire time. But the payback on that is going to be decades. You could just buy more panels and lay them out, assume you have space for it, and you're willing to carry them. So, yeah, it's a compromise. One of the nice things about this, the battery that comes with this solar generator 2000 Pro, is it can also be plugged into the cigarette lighter on your car,

so you could charge it as you're driving. It'll charge off the moving automobile. You can also charge it off of AC directly. It takes about two hours. So there are alternatives. Yeah, so give me a sense of what that looks like sort of in real life to have this thing filled up, because you have a bunch of stats in your review.

Let me read them. It says it can keep a projector running for 24 hours, an electric barbecue for about 100 minutes, an electric drill, like you said, for 60 hours. And these are all, like, useful, but kind of fake numbers, right? Like, I'm not going to, I don't need to run my projector for 24 straight hours. But, like, in your experience, as you use it, like, what do you, what does life look like as you're, like, running a full battery every day? I don't have the stats in front of me.

Like, what do the typical watt hours use in a day? But, like, if you imagine using an induction cooktop, for example, that's about 1,800 watts to use something like that, you might use it 30 minutes a day, so that's 900 watt hours. If you look at the capacity of this battery, that's 900 watt hours taken from 2,160 watt hours, right? So you still have more than half the capacity left after cooking all your meals on an induction cooktop. So, you know, that leaves capacity for all your other things that you might use. But because it's a generator, you can continue topping it off with solar power, whether that be

off the car, whether it be, you know, shore power, when you pull in, into someplace or solar panels. Okay. One of the things that jumped out to me looking at your review was there are these two meters on the screen. One is the power coming in from the solar panels and the other is the power going out from the devices. And all I could think is that I was going to be obsessively watching that thing to track.

You will be. Okay. It just feels like that tickles my brain in like the best and worst way all at the same time. And it is obsessive in the best way because I have a smart meter in my house, but it just kind of shows the whole house and what's going out. And I don't have solar panels. I live in the Netherlands. We don't have any sun.

And I also live between two taller buildings. So I have no roof access where I could put solar panels where it would actually make economic sense. So for me, like this thing's got, I forget to put the total numbers. I think it's eight ports in Europe, nine in the U.S. I can't remember. But you can plug a ton of stuff into this. And you can watch that meter jump and fall depending upon what's happening. I find it weirdly exhilarating as a gadget nerd to know what these things are using.

I mean, that's how I figured out the Starlink RV was using, right? Before, when I was thinking about hashtag VanLife, right, they were saying that the thing uses about 70 watts or so, which is a lot, right? But then when I did the review, and this is also like maybe a year later, and they've been optimizing it as it goes, I saw it averaging around 42. 42's not so bad. That's almost half of what it was a year ago. But with that knowledge, then you can plan, like, okay, for my day,

this is the capacity, especially if you're fitting out a van or a tiny home or whatever, with solar panels or even your own home, you need to know what those numbers are. You know, armed with that data, you can live off grid. It does feel like a special kind of nerd cred to be able to just like look around your house to know exactly how much power everything is using it all time. Like, I feel like that would make me feel very in control of my own life in a way that is totally unnecessary, but would feel very cool anyway. Yeah, absolutely.

And I should stress like, this isn't Walt Whitman's idea of going into the woods. Right? This is a very modern approach to living off grid. You keep your job. You take advantage of your flex work arrangements that your company is enabled. And you just have a different lifestyle. You escape. Like for me, I, you know, I kite surf, I mountain bike, I trail run. I do all these things. My wife as well. So living in the center of Amsterdam, I don't have access to that stuff. So it's amazing to be able to wake up occasionally on a Monday morning. And instead of waking up in the center of Amsterdam, I'm in the woods. So, you know, before I. I start my day, before I start my work day, I can just go have some fun and then come back. Maybe for my lunch break, I can have some fun and come back, right? It doesn't matter. You know, I'm still on Slack. I'm still on my Zoom calls. Maybe my background's a little bit different, but we can also fix that with virtual. Yeah, you're going to be one of those people who is, like, going to have a green screen, like, pinned to your shoulders. So it just shows your office behind you while you're, like, kite surfing. Maybe, maybe. I already, well, I broke one shoulder last year

my collarbone a month ago, so I think I'll probably keep the distractions to a minimum. Maybe stay in the van from now on. I should mention, you know, I was lugging this jackery around, which is, you know, it's almost 50 pounds, and I'm also old. I'm like 55 years old, and I had a broken collarbone, and I was able to still lug this thing around. So I do find it to be this ideal compromise of capacity, power, right? Because it's over 2,000 watts, and it peaks over 4,000, so it can really power just

about any appliance, and certainly any gadget you throw it. at it and portability. It's a very good product for what it is and if you have $3,000. Yeah. It's all good things. So, okay, before I let you go, as an aspiring van lifer, and I feel like I can really feel like your internal turmoil sitting in a room. You're like, why am I sitting in this room? I should just leave and go be outside. Exactly. There's no breeze. There's nothing. We're going to talk a lot about van life life on this show. You're going to have to come back. But what is like the biggest gaping hole in the tech that you would need to like really pull off van life. It seems like I would have assumed it was power, but it seems like power is like

maybe better than I would have thought. So what's the worst tech in the van life life right now? I mean, with money, you can fix anything. So, you know, weight is a problem. Okay. Because the more power you have, like if you go with a fully electric van, then you need a lot of batteries. You need a lot of solar panels. That increases the weight of your rig. Gas prices are way up, right? So that decreases your fuel economy. That's probably the biggest challenge at the moment. We've got this transformation towards electric vehicles. We've got the waning days of diesel, which is most of these vans are. And you want to keep this rig for a decade or, you know, I don't know how long. They're not cheap. You know, a brand new sprinter build in the U.S. by some of these adventure van companies are like

$200,000, right? So you want this thing to last. But, you know, with the shift to EVs, that's difficult. you know, I mean, Mercedes already makes an electric sprinter van, but yeah, you got to, if you're living off grid, you've got to get that thing charged. And it's one thing to charge one of these portable batteries. It's another thing to charge the entire battery block inside your van. Yeah, Jackery probably doesn't do that yet, I would guess. You'd need a couple more solo panels than they're selling you right now. Exactly. Fair enough. Well, when you figure out your EV setup, when you finish the sprinter shopping, you have to come back on their show and tell us about it. I absolutely will.

bring in Nilai and he's going to ask you questions and it's going to be a nine hour long episode. It's going to be amazing. Well, he might ask me questions like, when am I going to do this since I work for him? Yeah, that sounds about right. Awesome. Thomas, thank you. Appreciate it. It's really fun. Yeah, I enjoyed it. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then come back and get even deeper into the world of Starlink and space internet because I get the sense that it's both more complicated and potentially more exciting than I even realized. And not just for Thomas in the Woods and Alex on a boat. We'll be right back.

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. So we've talked a lot about Starlink so far today. And it's obvious that for people who want to work and live but don't want to be stuck in a room at a desk all day, Starlink is a big deal. But the satellite internet race is much bigger than Starlink and potentially much bigger than just people who want to live on both.

and in-RVs. But it's also complicated, and not just because putting satellites into space is complicated. It's about policy and spectrum and competition and astronauts and astronomers and all kinds of different stuff. Russell Brandem and Lauren Grush have been covering different sides of the space internet race. Russell on the policy side and Lauren on the space side. But all this stuff overlaps in these really important, interesting ways. So I figured I'd just bring the boat together and try to dive into all of it, or at least as much

as we can. Hi, Lauren. Hi, nice. Thanks for having me. And hi, Russell. Why, hello. Okay, so we are here to talk about space internet, which is like, we talk about Starlink a lot on this show. But I want to talk about like the bigger world of satellite internet and this idea that instead of digging trenches, we can just put things into space and that will solve the internet.

And it's like, it's a tech question. It's a regulatory question. But Russell, you were saying right before we started recording that you have a personal story as to why this is interesting to you. Yeah. Well, so for a lot of the pandemic, I hung out with my parents. they live in sort of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, which is quite rural. And I had been working from there for like months on end. And one day, like, the internet just dropped. And it's sort of like, okay, if it's out for, you know, an hour or something, we can work with it. But it was just basically

out from like 11 a.m. to like 7 p.m. is when it came on. It was like, oh, this is really, I did not do a good job at my job today. And it was sort of like the entire region. Everyone had the same provider. There was the one provider. And like they don't have a ton of money for like quick response crews. There's a lot of trees. They are kind of going to get to it when they get to it.

But it is a real kind of barrier to I'm just going to live in the woods and people can talk to me through the internet, the possibility that you'll just be out all day is like really alarming if, you know, you're kind of needed for your employment. I think it also, as I've learned more about the options for rural internet and the lack thereof, I think I've been really spoiled having lived in majority cities for most of my life, thinking that, oh, it's just you can have multiple options for internet providers, whereas, you know, you go just like an hour or two, outside of major city and there is one provider and you must rely on that provider or else. I didn't have a situation like Russell, but I did move to New Orleans for a while where Cox

is pretty much the only provider available to you. And that was constantly going out either from hurricanes or from storms. And, you know, that's when I really realized just how much of a lifeline it is for working during the pandemic, you know, because that's all I have when I work remote is the internet. Totally. And I think that's actually, that's a good frame for like the two sides of this, I think, which is a really useful way to think about it. On the one hand, there's like, and this is a very sort of American problem where like we have no internet competition. Everything is terrible. And even if you live in a city, you pay too much for bad internet connection. Like this, this just is like objectively true and this is like a very American problem. And then on the

other side, there is this huge part of America and the world that is like not properly connected to the internet. Maybe the one bit of level setting we should do here, Lauren, and I know you've been asked to do this a million times, but is like satellite internet is like a thing that has sort of loosely existed for a long time, right? Like the idea that I can get internet from a satellite has been true for two decades. What's changed now? Like at a very broad strokes, what's new now? So the biggest difference, the old generation of satellite internet, was typically satellites in this orbit known as geosynchronous orbit. And it's a very high orbit, a roughly 22,000. miles up. But at that position in the sky, satellites essentially match the rotation of the Earth. So

if you put a satellite in that band, it's going to appear as if it's over the same patch of sky at all times. And so that's great for connecting to that satellite because you always know when it's above you. However, it's very far. And so the latency of getting signals from that satellite are pretty bad. If you need to download something or you need fast internet, that's not going to be a great option for you. Definitely better to have, you know, fiber optic internet down here. What this new generation of satellite internet entails is non-geo, so non-geosynchronous satellites, which are in low to medium Earth orbit, so much closer to the Earth. So the good news with that is you get lower latency, right, because they're closer to the Earth. The problem is in order to have a satellite

overhead at all times, and to be able to connect to one of them, you need a lot more satellites, because they're moving much faster where the closer they are to Earth. So the way I kind of describe it is they're doing like a synchronized ballet in the sky so that when you have a dish pointing up at the sky, there is typically a couple of satellites within range and it can connect.

And once one of those satellites passes by, it'll have connected to another satellite so that you kind of have that seamless transition. And so that's why you have all of these companies like SpaceX and Amazon and one web, who are thinking of putting lots and lots of satellites. We're talking about hundreds to thousands of satellites into these orbits so that you can get global coverage and make sure that you,

if you're trying to connect to one of the satellites, you'll have multiple options in the sky at one time. Okay. And so you just kind of glossed over the names, but I want to come back to that real fast before we move on and past that. Because I think when we talk about this stuff, we almost always just talk about SpaceX and Starlink, right? Because Elon Musk exists.

So we talk about the things that he makes more than most other. other things. Is it like as big a player in this space as it is in sort of the like public discussion about it? Like who else matters in the sort of space internet race right now? Well, I think it's key to remember that SpaceX is very far along. So they've already rolled out their program and people are actively using this service. So that's a lot of the reason why they also get attention. I mean, I was just checking the statistics before we joined here. They have roughly 2,700 satellites in orbit right now. That could probably change by the time. you air this episode. I'm not sure when the next launches, but they're launching with that

level of frequency that there could be more by the time this airs. That's a big part of it. One web is another one. They don't envision launching as many satellites, and they're more focused on selling to governments or to companies and larger players, less of a direct-to-consumer-type situation that SpaceX is going for. But they envision, I think, roughly 600-something satellites for global coverage. And they have satellites up. They're not done fleshing out their constellation yet, but they do have satellites up and they plan to start rolling out their coverage soon. And then you have Amazon kind of on the heels, which they also envision launching thousands of satellites. They haven't launched anything yet, though. But they've been doing a lot of development.

We've been following their work. They have plans to launch, I believe, before the end of the year, but they're also launching on an experimental rocket, so that timeline could be very iffy. So those are the biggest ones I'm tracking. And then you have smaller companies that are launching much smaller constellations. But then you also have kind of these pie in the sky ideas. Like I believe Europe is considering something. China is considering something. I believe the original guy who started one web tried to file something for 30,000 satellites in

Rwanda or something crazy. I need to check that number. It's actually probably higher than that. So it's very in vogue right now to say that you're going to launch a mega constellation of some kind. But the ones that I mentioned earlier are probably the biggest players I'm following. Okay. Yeah, it's a very Amazon-y move to just like, they just had one meeting and somebody left and

was like, yeah, we'll launch 3,000 satellites. It's fine. We'll just give us time. We'll figure it out. But I'm glad you brought up all these other countries because Russell, my big, like, the thing I've been trying to wrap my head around from a policy perspective here is like, It seems like we are going about this the exact wrong way, which is like to look at space and say, okay, what if everyone launched their own satellites and none of this worked together and made sense?

And it was just this like corporate chaos in the skies and wouldn't that be delightful? Where it seems like in a beautiful, perfect, totally impossible world, this would be like a global problem with a collective solution. So I guess my question to you is like, who is in charge of this? And are we just letting chaos rain as people launch satellites? It's true. In a perfect world, we would have a single world government, and it would rule with an iron fist over the land in the skies. But we don't have that. One of the interesting things actually is that the best regulated part of it is actually the spectrum that they need to beam down through. And Starlink is having a whole fight with Dish over this right now. They need a certain wavelength to connect sort of down. And that is regulated by the FCC or sort of the equivalent telecom regulators in the different countries. I mean, I don't know. Lauren can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I have not actually seen a ton of regulation around how many satellites you can have in the sky and how all of that works.

I don't know. You're not in your head. Not really because, and that's kind of a big point of contention right now is back when Starlink was approved, they were just kind of left and right. that was a Jeep high, I remember. They were just kind of approving all of these constellations being like, yeah, let's see it. Let's go. Let's put them up. You know, and once they started launching, you know, astronomers got extremely concerned because they saw how bright the satellites are in the sky. And when it comes to observing distant places in the universe from Earth, we have to do this thing called long exposure. And if you have a bright satellite pass through your image that leaves a big,

bright streak in your picture that you have to account for. And obviously, the more satellites that you have in the sky, the more opportunity for your picture to get messed up. So everyone was kind of wondering, why isn't there some kind of rule as to what we can put in Earth orbit? And it's not just about the astronomers that there's a concern with. It's also space traffic. We don't know the carrying capacity of these orbits. We just know that space is big. And it is, you know, the space around Earth is quite large and we haven't completely filled it up yet. But what if there is a point at which, you know, we've put so many things into these orbits that we can't safely launch anything anymore because the risk of colliding with something is just too large. We don't know if that

point exists, you know, and a lot of space traffic, people are sounding the alarm about that just because right now we're kind of on a let's find out trajectory. We're just putting more and more of these satellites into Earth orbit and seeing what the consequences are in real time rather than kind of taking a step back and figuring that out. So yeah, in terms of there's no American policy for a limit in terms of how many of these satellites we can put up, and there's certainly no global policy in terms of a limit of how many of these satellites we can put up. So we're on this ride together. We're all going to find out in real time if we're heading towards catastrophe or not. I mean, on the other side of it, the scenario you're describing where we have like a single central regulator and they say, okay, this is what the constellation is going to look like.

And then that's the only person running satellite internet. You're describing a telecom monopoly. It's just in space instead of on the ground. So like, you know, obviously Lauren brings up really good points, but there are benefits to saying we're not going to say like Starlink is the only one that's allowed to do this because they got their first. maybe Starlink, like obviously we complain about, like there are problems with the service that we'll get into. Maybe other entrants will have a sort of better way of doing it that will address some of those problems. It's like hard to know. It's tricky.

It's funny because they are getting there first, they are in a bit of a land grab situation. The more they fill the Earth orbit with satellites, at some point there may be a time where we're like, okay, we need to press the brakes on this. And if Starlink satellites are already up there, then there may be no room for other megac constellations. And that's why you see a lot of these entities, you know, asking for spectrum rights for these giant constellations because they want to get the approval now to do this and to start filling them out before it becomes an issue. Well, yeah, that's like our friend launching 300,000 of them.

It's like, okay, if we assume, even if we don't know what the number is that we can get into orbit, the number is finite. you might as well try to do as much as you possibly can because then if you're the one who's there suddenly that puts you in like a hugely powerful position for whatever is coming next. Just to be clear though, I don't think the Rwanda entity is going to launch 300,000 satellites. Listen, it's good to have dreams. I support it. Yes. But so back to the sort of rural broadband thing, which I think is like it's the sort of, you know,

happy story that all these companies like to tell about the possibilities, right? is we can connect the unconnected. Right now, all of this stuff is pretty transparently just, like, way too expensive to be meaningful to people like that, right? Like, we've talked even to Thomas Ricker on this show is like, his big thing is like, oh my God, I can put it in an RV and it can give me internet connection in places I didn't have it before. But it's like that assumes you can afford a lot of things, including like monthly service.

And there are obviously people who have been hamstrung by just physical ability, but then there are also people for whom this stuff is still going to be too expensive. Like, how long is the. road do you guys think before this becomes like a meaningfully possible thing for people to get both like Starlink is only selling so many dishes to people like are we are we a couple of years away are we a couple of decades away from this being sort of available to everybody what do you have any sense well I think the biggest barrier right now at least when it comes to Starlink and they've talked about this pretty openly is getting the cost down of building those kits so in order to

tap into the Starlink constellation you need to order their starter kit which comes with the dish that you place around your home or I guess in your RV or on your RV comes with the, you know, cables and the router and all that stuff. Making those kits has been pretty costly. And SpaceX says they're bringing down the cost of that, but that's kind of the driver of why they're so expensive. So right now, I believe they were, or for a while they were selling those kits at a loss. And so that's kind of why it's been so expensive. But ultimately, I think if they bring the costs down, then perhaps they can eventually bring the costs down. But launching and maintaining satellites in space is always going to be expensive if we rely on chemical propulsion to get us there.

Even though SpaceX has brought down the cost significantly, it's still just a costly endeavor to maintain a satellite constellation like this. So I think we're also in another wait-and-see approach in terms of whether or not this will be financially viable for them. And as Elon has noted, multiple times, you know, other companies have tried this before and failed and gone bankrupt. So SpaceX obviously has a lot of other irons in the fire that can maybe keep them afloat, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure if this will be something that they can maintain and make enough money from. I think the maintenance point is really key where like right now we're still in the phase where they're building out the network. They're launching more stuff. They're launching

coverage in more areas. I do think, you know, in the classic, like, outage scenario that Lauren and I were describing at the beginning, right? The problem is that there is a network, right? It's already in place. And something happens that brings it down. And some, you know, for a terrestrial network, some guy has to go out and, you know, cut down whatever tree has fallen down over the thing and replace the fiber optic cable. There are going to be versions of that for satellite internet, right? I mean, especially since Lauren is talking about, are we putting so much stuff in low Earth orbit that it's going to meaningfully increase satellite collisions, right? It's tricky to really say what the process will look like for maintenance and downtime if you're living in an area where satellite internet is your primary means of connecting, right? Which is what we're trying to envision.

What are the costs to sort of Starlink and the consumer going to look like? And just generally, is it going to be reliable enough that people can really depend on it? We are still a long way from that, from sort of knowing really what that looks like. And I think that's another big unanswered question. I think another question I have, too, is just, is the rural market enough to sustain Starlink? And is there enough demand for this to sustain these megaconsolation space internets? because if that's not enough, that's going to be an issue. And that's why you see Starlink pursuing other areas rather than just direct to consumer,

right? You see them trying to get Starlink in planes. They said they were focused more on, you know, direct to consumer, but they're definitely trying to expand in other ways. So you're going to see SpaceX try all sorts of opportunities to get Starlink in certain places. Ultimately, it's just, is that going to be enough to sustain the operations of Starlink? And if it's not, then how will that make the costs come down? You know, the people have spoken to who have Starlink love it. It might just be because their options where they are are so dreadful, you know?

Like if there's even a little bit of improvement in what they have and their outages don't last all day like wrestle experienced, you know, that's something that's really, really going to change their lives. And so the people that have it love it, is that enough? you know, are there enough of them? I don't know. Right. Yeah, there's like, I have a hard time imagining the world in which, like, I live in a townhouse in a crowded neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Like, I have a hard time imagining the world in which I become a Starlink customer anytime soon. But I'm sorry, I'm just really hung up on the idea that, like, you call Starlink to be like,

hey, my internet's out. And they, like, call a guy and he's like, oh, crap. And, like, goes and and gets on a rocket and, like, launches himself into space to go. It's just like Matt Damon in space fixing your satellite just so you can have internet again. And they're like, give us like eight months, it'll be back online. It's no problems. Well, I think what are the benefits of Starlink, or at least the proposed benefits, is that things like that wouldn't happen. The outages that you get from Starlink are like when Neil I tested it and ran into the trees in his yard, you know, like that's an outage for you. And if the constellation is working as it should, you know, unless a satellite blows up or, you know,

I can't imagine that outages will be that bad unless you don't have enough. satellite coverage in the area that you're in. Yeah. What did cable companies make of all of this? I guess disclosure time Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, which is the parent company of the version. Is there going to come a time when the like Verizon's and Comcasts and all them of the world have to get involved in this too? Like stop digging trenches, start launching satellites. Well, I mean, they're cable companies. They're not satellite companies. I think there's there, you know, they talk a big game, right? But they also talked a big game about people subscribing to cable TV forever. Like, I don't know. They're talking up their own book. That's what they do.

Can I interest you in landline phone service, Russell? Would that be exciting for you? I do think if you are a Comcast or a Verizon or an AT&T in terms of the cable part, their big reason for existing as a company is that they have this big infrastructure network and they are making money from it either by charging people access and sort of all of these different things. But that is their business. Also, if we have satellite internet, we're still going to have.

terrestrial internet for lots of other things. I mean, we still have railroads. We use them for lots of things. The companies that were doing railroads in the 1850s and they were at the cutting edge of technology, they're still around. They're just not at the cutting edge of technology anymore. Which they should be. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you just confirmed the worst fear of every single telecom executive that they're now the railroads. But that's the negative. Like, that's the worst case scenario is that they're railroads, right? The best case scenario is, a bunch of tech people had a crazy idea and raised a bunch of money and it never really came together, just like happened with Motorola in the 90s and all of these other people.

And like, that is still a very live possibility, right? We're still kind of on the knife cinch with this. Yeah, that is, that is very fair. So before we end here, Lauren, I want to go back to the thing you said about the people who have it love it. Because it does feel like there's like a very specific group of people, right? Who is like never had an internet connection before. this is like what Tom Stricker was talking about. He's like, I'm just, I go to places. I never

had internet connection. And now I have a kind of meh internet connection. And it feels like magic. And it's like the bar for that is so low because we're just giving people things that they didn't have before. Like what's the next group of people for these services? What's your sense? Like is it the people who have just never had internet connection before who suddenly have something? Obviously, big win. Is there a second group that's kind of come online to these services? I mean, me personally, I'm excited to see how travelers use the service. So the FCC just approved that Starlink could be used on moving vehicles. So I think that could be of something of a game changer, especially I've been reading

all of Thomas Rickers dispatches and with extreme jealousy because I've been kind of dreaming of the van life for a little while. And that seems like one of the main things that would make it a possibility. You can literally work from anywhere. Like what a game changer that could be. So especially with Starlink being on flights, I think the goal is to be able to just get on the plane and tap into it immediately. You know, things in motion, I believe, will be the next step for this. How that works logistically, I'm not sure. And will we need some regulation around that? Because if you're using internet and a driving car, what does that mean? But ultimately, that's something where I see appeal for me personally. You know, same with you. I don't need Starlink here where I am.

am in my home. But if I wanted to hit the road for a week and make sure that I had, I could work from, you know, my van or my car, that would be a game changer for me. And especially since we're moving to a much more remote-friendly society, I feel like that could be a huge selling point for people. Yeah, I live in Washington, D.C. I'm in New York all the time. Like, if Starlink can fix Amtrak Wi-Fi, like, you can have all my money. Just, just please just take it. Like, we're, I'm good. I don't care what it costs. Elon Musk, you can have my house. It's fine. Just please give me an Amtrak Wi-Fi that works. Russell, what about you?

Are you just excited to go back to rural Pennsylvania and have internet that actually works for a change? Oh, man. I mean, yeah, that would be great. I do think what's exciting about it for me is where we absolutely started with this was situations where you don't have another source of internet. And like if you have multiple networks that are serving your area, oh, my providers down, you know, I'm going to go to the coffee shop and work for a few hours until it comes back,

right? And that's like a much friendlier situation than there's no connectivity anywhere in the valley, right? I think that that is probably where we'll land with satellite internet, that it's like kind of icing on the cake. I do think if we're just looking for ways to make American networks better, there are probably cheaper ways than building an entire satellite constellation. Like the government could just spend hundreds of billions of dollars running fiber to remote police in America. That's totally the kind of thing governments do. But yeah, I mean, it's always good to have more connectivity. It's always good to have another way to connect to the hive mind.

The thing is we have to come up with something that is as cool as a rocket launch, but for digging trenches with fiber optic cables. That's how you solve that problem. We need rocket launches, but for fiber optic cables. Fireworks. There you go. Fireworks every time you dig a new trench. No, I listen to Russell talking. You know, it's always good.

And I think I heard, you know, thousands of astronomers and space traffic management experts scream and terror. All right, Russell, Lauren, thank you both. We have done this long enough. I'm going back on vacation. Which means that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more on everything we talked about on Theverge.com. And you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Thomas is Trixie. Russell is Russell Brandem. Lauren is Lauren Grush. And I'm Pierce.

This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Eleanor Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, anything, or ideas on what I should be doing in Miami this week because it's very hot. You can always email Vergecast at theVurge.com. Alex, Nelai, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Samsung,

Congress, folding phones, flipping phones, chips, chips, and a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.