Building The World's Most Powerful Satellites w/ Will Marshall | EP #90

In this episode, Peter and Will dive into satellite technology, what it takes to create a company like Planet, and its effect on ecosystems across the world. 11:56 | AI Revolutionizes Satellite Technology 21:47 | Will's Exponential Journey to Success 39:15 | Groundbreaking Rocket Launch Technology Improvements Will Marshall, Chairman, Co-Founder, and CEO of Planet, transitioned from a scientist at NASA to an entrepreneur, leading the company from its inception in a garage to a public entity with over 800 staff. With a background in physics and extensive experience in space technology, he has been instrumental in steering Planet towards its mission of propelling humanity towards sustainability and security, as outlined in its Public Benefit Corporation charter. Recognized for his contributions to the field, Marshall serves on the board of the Open Lunar Foundation and was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Learn more about Planet ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots Learn about my executive summit, Abundance360 2025: https://www.abundance360.com/summit _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  Information is power. Data is the new oil. It's the thing that's going to power all the industries. We're building a system that makes humanity able to smartly manage resources, a bit like the eye system with the visual cortex helps humans make smart decisions.

• 1:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's awe inspiring and it's important for people to understand what's coming.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  So I think of it as awareness to action. That's the phase change that we're going from. And action requires detailed tools and information that's timely and relevant to your day to day life. And just like the mainframe computer, the desktop revolution, it's going to change the whole dynamics of what's possible in space. And this is just the beginning.

• 1:43Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter here. Welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a dear friend. May I say, an old dear friend. We've been friends for over a couple of decades. Dr. Will Marshall. Will, good to see you, buddy.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Great to be on.

• 1:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, so listen, you are, you've got a massive moonshot. And it really, you know, when I think of you, I think about raster scanning the planet. It's about being able to know anything I want, anytime I want, anywhere I want, and really understanding the vibrancy, the problems, the opportunities globally.

• 2:19Peter Diamandis?

  So let's begin with a quick overview of what is Planet Labs? And then I want to get into what is your 10, 20, 30 year vision for Planet Labs? Because it's audacious and it truly is a moonshot.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, certainly, look, Planet in short is a company, we have 200 satellites that image the entire landmass of the Earth every day. So it's a bit like if you go onto Google and click on the satellite imagery layer, except that image is typically a few years old. We've got today and yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. Basically 2,500 images now on average for every point of the landmass of the Earth, documenting immense change going on and powering AI tools to sit on top that enable us to take smarter care of the planet, resources upon it.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  But in many ways, we started as a space company. Now we're a data company and that's the cool thing that's going on now. Space companies, it's less about the rockets and the satellites and more and more about the data and how it can totally transform the Earth economy. And that's, that's the sort of exciting phase where.

• 3:36Peter Diamandis?

  And I guess, you know, as a public company now, it's the company's name is Planet. It used to be Planet Labs back in the early days, so I'll refer to it as Planet. And it's amazing, you know, we're going to talk about the stories of how you went from literally a phone satellite to now 200 satellites. I think the largest imaging, private imaging collection of satellites. Maybe the NRO has more, I don't know, maybe they use yours, who knows? You've got more than the NRO and more than the governments. Yeah, amazing. That's awesome. And an incredible journey, I mean, buying satellites from Google, getting Eric Schmidt

• 4:17Peter Diamandis?

  and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the entire group there, and Steve Jervis, one of the most incredible venture capitalists in the field to back you as a 20 something year old. So I want to tell all that story. And it really, the ups, the downs and the audacity of the moonshot you've not only planned but built. But I want to go someplace else first because I've heard you describe this and it's awe inspiring and it's important for people to understand what's coming. What is, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? What's your vision of what planet is doing? And what's possible for, for humanity with the tech that you're building?

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Well, look, it's a big question, but I really think that we have the tools at our disposal now to manage the planet in a very different way. And we've got a lot of challenges, the climate change, and we can talk about biodiversity loss and all these things. But more broadly, we're on a spaceship hurtling around the sun. And we were taking data of it once a month, once a year. And how the heck are you managing that? It's a bit like, you know, um, um, I think we were having a conversation with our grandchildren. Like then they'll say, hey, how did you manage the planet before you measured it regularly? Of course, the answer was not very well, you know?

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Um, and, and, and, and you obviously can't be a smart actor without data. I mean, in, in, as a space geek, I'll tell you a little space story, you know? That when you put satellites into space, you obviously try to measure them faster than the time scale they change. Like if they're spinning around once a minute, you better measure that spin faster than once a minute. Like if you take a data point once a minute, you ain't going to stop the spin, right? You need to measure it faster. We are all on a spaceship, eight billion astronauts hurtling around the sun. And, you know, we, we have an impact on that planet on days and weeks time scale of human activity. How do we manage that if we're not taking information? If we're not taking data points on that sort of time scale?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  So it's a, it's, it stands to reason that you can't help the planet without that sort of data. As they like to say, you, you can't manage what you don't measure. So the vision in many ways is to give everyone the tools that enables us to make smart day to day decisions based on the physical understanding of what's going on the planet. I actually, you know, did a TED talk which extended it just beyond just the imagery of the earth. It's the AI on top that then enables you to sort of have a query of earth. This is in 2018. And you know, in modern parlance, it'll be like Planet GPT, you know, what is it that

• 7:09Speaker 03

  you should just be like, you can text, search the internet and text now in in human readable form, if you like, what's going on and give you human readable answers. You should be able to do that for the earth. How many trees are there being cut down on the Amazon? Where are those trees? What's the plot versus time? What's happening in my neighborhood? Who's doing what? Why, where, how the park's doing? What, how do they need help? What do we need to do to clear up the pollution? Why is, where's the pollution come from? You know, all these challenges.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Humans should be able to have that at their fingertips and without having to have a PhD in space satellite imagery processing in order to get that, right? Just like we are doing again. So, you know, AI companies have figured out how to turn the text of the internet first into a searchable place, that was Google, and now into this human readable way of interacting with it.

• 8:09Peter Diamandis?

  I love Planet GPT, it's a fantastic, it's a fantastic term. You should put that out there more.

• 8:17Peter Diamandis?

  So, I love the idea that at any time you can query what's going on on the surface of the earth

• 8:26Peter Diamandis?

  and get an answer. And, and do it at a variety of spectral information and resolutions. So, you have 200 satellites today, roughly, yes?

• 8:42Peter Diamandis?

  What do you, you know, if you were, you're setting your, you're a moonshot entrepreneur, you know, a decade from now, or two decades from now, what do you imagine to create Planet GPT where you've got? Information at a regular basis at, you know, high resolution. What do you, what do you want to, where do you want to get to? What's your vision?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Well, on the data side, I think we're going to, and the satellite piece, we're going to get more and more accurate data, so higher resolution, smaller pixel size.

• 9:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, what's the resolution today?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Well, our daily scan is at three meter resolution. Our highest resolution imagery is at 50 centimeters. So we have a fleet of 20 satellites that can zoom in anywhere. And actually, it's kind of fun to think of it like how the human eye works, which is you have peripheral vision in much of your visual field. You only have high resolution in a tiny bit in the center. And, and actually it's black and white beyond a certain point in your peripheral. But you're very good at change detection. And if there's something changes, your visual cortex goes, hey, guys, get that high res over here. And then you turn your eyes to your head, right? So we have the scan, which looks at the whole peripheral at three meter resolution, the whole planet. And then we have the high res that can zoom in on any particular piece that changes.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  So we call that system fovea, a bit like the, inspired by the eye.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  And the visual cortex is of course the AI that looks at the scan, finds the changes, finds what's interesting in the changes, blocks out everything else, and then coordinates what we should do as a result of that, including taking higher resolution imagery, but also making decisions day to day, right? Oh, that's a threat. This is just a cloud, you know, no big deal. And, and so think of it that way. I, I think we're, we're, we're building a system that makes humanity able to smartly manage resources, a bit like the eye system with the visual cortex helps humans make smart decisions.

• 10:35Peter Diamandis?

  Do you remember calling me during COVID one night, really excited? I think I just had a power outage in the home and you're on the phone giving me your, your vision of where, I guess now calling a planet GPT, where it was going. And I was just, it was the most compelling vision I've heard about. Both giving our children the tools to manage the planet, but it's also a multi-trillion dollar business opportunity. Can you dive in a little bit more? So, so do you think we'll have thousands of satellites? Do you think we'll have higher resolution?

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think it will get more and more real time and higher resolution. So maybe, you know, we'll definitely get submit a daily scan. But I think we'd get more like hourly, maybe less.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  We'll also have other spectral bands. So we talk about going up in spatial resolution, temporal resolution, how frequently, and spectral resolution, how many spectral bands. And that is less usual for the human eye, but it's a, a, a, an absolute field day for the algorithms because they can use different colors to distinguish between things. I mean, even down to, I mean, we're just about to launch some hyperspectral satellites that have 400 spectral bands that enable us, literally, you can tell not just that it's a green car, it's a green car that comes from this factory over here because that's the only factory that produces that shade of green, you know?

• 11:59Peter Diamandis?

  And you could also look, you could also look at what the oil reserves are of a country by virtue of the thermal heating of the oil tanks.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Because, well, you're certainly the levels of the tanks, we can even do that today. I mean, but I mean, even like, I mean, one of the most wicked problems of the earth is where's all the life, what different forms are where? We can actually tell species type of the, the trees or the grasses or the coals underneath the sea down to, you know, a certain depth and so on, all automatically. And so this, and this is a field day, as I said, for, for AI, because it can pull out all of these things, right? And, and help us understand again the planet.

• 12:40Peter Diamandis?

  So it's, it's, we're both Trekkies. And so when the Starship Enterprise, you know, sort of goes into orbit around the planet and Captain Kirk, you know, tells Spock to scan the planet. And he says, we got these many life forms here. I mean, that's basically what you're enabling.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Totally, totally.

• 12:58Peter Diamandis?

  Now, I mean, talk about the idea of what industries and businesses this enables. So can I, can I just paint the picture one second? So. Thousands of satellites, yes?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right, yeah.

• 13:14Peter Diamandis?

  Thousands of satellites with each satellite has how many sensors on it?

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, a few. I mean, it doesn't need to be many. I mean, it's mainly through one telescope but different spectral regions, yeah.

• 13:26Peter Diamandis?

  And all of this is being fed into a data layer that's being able to, is constantly being analyzed by AI.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:36Peter Diamandis?

  Right? I mean, so this is about early detection of disasters, it's about early detection of opportunities, it's about discovery, it's science. It's definitely industry, it's hedge funds managing hedge funds.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  It's everything. I mean.

• 13:52Peter Diamandis?

  Go, go, go, give me an understanding of how big this opportunity is and how does it change the way we do business today? Cause it's massive.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, information is power. I mean, the economist said data is the new oil. It's the thing that's going to power all the industries. By the way, when, a little fun fact, if you look at all the tech giants and what they're doing with AI, they're all open sourcing the AI code. They're all open sourcing exactly zero of the data. Because the asset that they have that's unique is always the data, not the algorithms, or less the algorithms than the data. And that's why there's the, you know, so when you think of AI, where, where to invest in an AI company? Who's got the interesting data? Because that's going to be where you feel, so data is the new oil. It powers all the industries. Hopefully it's not dirty like oil, but it is analogous in the sense that it, it powers all these different industry.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Oil powers all these different industries. Data is going to power all those industries as well. If you're in transportation, it's going to make more efficient transportation. If you're in agriculture, it's going to make more efficient agriculture. If you're in government, it's going to make more efficient government. If you're in, you know, you, you just race across all the things, yes, hedge funds, insurance, you know? And I can give, get more concrete. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. And I think of the world as, you know, broadly undergoing three transformations today. One is digital transformation. That's the transition of industries to help them digitize, bring their systems.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Into uh uh on into information world such that they can then be more efficient. Um. The second is sustainability and we've got to transition to have a sustainable economy. It doesn't blow up the boundaries of the planet. Uh. It obviously does so in a way that we don't further heat the planet and so on. Um. And the third is we've got to do all of that with having good peace and security. Um, uh, geopolitically. And what we need for all three of those vectors is transparency and accountability of what goes on. So everyone needs to know and understand their supply chains for supply chain risk, for se- security, for um, uh, uh, uh, um, uh, sustainability. But let yeah, let me get a little bit more concrete. Digital transformation, take agriculture.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  We image every farmer's field on the earth every day. That's um roughly a quarter of the landmass of the planet is agricultural land. Every single farmer's field, we can tell in each three by three box. What crop is it? Is it corn, wheat soil? How well is it doing? What it practices the farmer use? Um, and what they should do next, whether they should add water. Uh, the soil is too dry. We can actually tell the soil moisture level. Um, is the crop in need of fertilizer, herbicide or not? If they're putting too much so that it's causing runoff that you could then save. Uh, in total, we think that we can improve crop yields by at least twenty percent and decrease use of fertilizer and other things and other inputs by twenty percent as well.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  A forty percent in- increase to efficiency of a trillion dollar sector, that's a big deal. I could go through industry like industry on digital transformation. Then there's sustainability transformation. Um, here, we need to, you know, help us uh uh uh ourselves to manage the planet. I'll give you an example from just last year. Um, Brazil, we do a weekly um image of a a a scan for new roads of uh uh road starts in the Brazilian Amazon, the whole Brazilian Amazon once per week. And if we find a new road, it's a sign of early sign of either illegal deforestation because they put in these logging roads before they then get a tree or illegal narcotics or illegal um um mining.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  We provide these day, these weekly alerts to the federal minute, the federal police in Brazil. They go out, they sent last year 3,000 expeditions based on our alerts. That where they, they would, and they would in total reduced deforestation in Brazil by 55% in one year on the back of this system. And they confiscated $2 billion worth of assets.

• 18:01Peter Diamandis?

  I hope you got a commission on that.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  We kind of did, yeah. I mean, that was hard sale. It wasn't actually done that, but I mean, there's great ROI. And so that's sustainability transformation. And then peace and security is where we help countries like what's happening in Ukraine right now. We are, we did a building damage assessment across all of Ukraine, helping everyone to understand what's it going to cost to rebuild. We did an assessment of where the crops and how well the crops are doing for food security for that country. And also for the world, because it's a breadbasket for the world. We did an assessment of how the Russians are stealing grain, where they're taking it to. You know, there's all this stuff that we can help operationally and in certain broader humanitarian sense. And finally, also in terms of hearts and minds. Every time Russia says, oh, we don't bomb civilian targets.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  We have shared with the New York Times where they bombed civilian targets that last, you know, the schools and hospitals. It's accountability that we can share this because it's not a classified system owned by the NRO. You know, we can share that data with news media where it's appropriate to shed light on what's going on and hold those actors accountable. This is transparency equals accountability. And so these are the three sort of major areas we can help in a couple of specific.

• 19:17Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. I speak about the fact that, that people behave differently when they're being watched. That, you know, you put a camera in front of the dictator and the camera, the dictator changes their behavior. You put. You know, drones over poachers going after anosaurus and the poachers go away. And so this is complete and total transparency and forced accountability. I remember you speaking about a vision of the future of like brand new layers of Googleable data or, or, you know, Geminiable or chat GPT-able data where

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Queryable, I think I said.

• 19:57Peter Diamandis?

  What queryable, yeah, where, where a school kid can, can literally can go and, and discover whatever they want. Can you, can you speak a little bit about that information layer on top of the planet and what that means?

• 20:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that's right. Um, the way I broadly think about it actually, and you taking it more into the sort of consciousness realm. I mean, when humans went to the moon and looked back and saw the earth, we helped up level human spirit to say, hey, we're on a planet. It's fragile. It made to a phase change in human consciousness. The thin layer of atmosphere protecting us from the vacuum of space, the coldness of space. That's, you know, it was daunting, but it helped sort of give birth to the green movement. I think we're on the verge of living thing is we've got a big mirror

• 20:49Speaker 03

  to look at ourselves in the face, that, that, that webcam is, it's more of a mirror and back to ourselves, right? And with that, we, it's less about, we're already aware that we're on a planet. But now it's enabling us to take smarter action because everyone can see everything, right? It's, it's, so I think of it as awareness to action. That's the phase change that we're going from. And action requires detailed tools and information that's, that's timely and relevant to your day to day life. Anyway, you know, going, going to your, to your journey for, for a child. Look, think about the exploration that can be done on this planet. But I love sci fi like you do. You're talking about Star Trek. But sci-reality is fucking amazing.

• 21:35Peter Diamandis?

  It's quite all right.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  I get too, I get, I barely get time for sci-fi because there's so many sci-facts that I just get boggled by, right? The Earth is full of those. You look around, our planet is constantly changing. I look at our imagery every day and you see rivers changing. You see people harvest things, you see boats move, you see all this stuff happening. The Earth is dynamic. We have this false impression the Earth is a static place because we were used to maths, whether it's online or physical. That's not how the world works. The Earth is dynamic. What an exploration. Go, go, go, go pile in.

• 22:12Peter Diamandis?

  Everyone, it's Peter. In a few weeks, I'm gathering an incredible group of AI leaders, including Ray Kurzweil, Eric Schmidt, Mustafa Suleyman, Ahmad Mustak, Michael Saylor and others at my Private Abundance Summit to discuss the impact of AI on our lives, our businesses and the world. The Abundance Summit is a private community open to extraordinary moonshot entrepreneurs. It's Singularity University's highest level program and it's not for everyone. If you're at the top of your game and you want to learn more about this program, click on the link below to be considered. Okay, let's go back to the episode. Enjoy. For everybody listening, Will is an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur, an exponential entrepreneur.

• 22:56Peter Diamandis?

  And we met each other in the space community. God, when were the, when were the space gen conferences?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, I think we met in 1999 in that Vienna conference and then 2001, 2002, 2001, 2002. I don't know. We definitely met in, I think 1999 was when we met, so 25 years ago.

• 23:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Pretty ancient at this time.

• 23:17Peter Diamandis?

  I don't know. I still feel like a kid. And you're, and you're still playing with toys. So, but they're world-changing toys. And I want to dive into the journey, right? I keep on reminding people that, you know, these moonshots that entrepreneurs are taking are not overnight successes. They're typically overnight successes after 10, 11 years of hard work.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 23:42Peter Diamandis?

  And, and I want to go back to your story. I'd like you to share the story, the ups and the downs and those pivotal moments. And just to put some numbers on it, Planet was founded circa 2010, I think.

• 23:59Peter Diamandis?

  And then you went public in 2021. So you can go and find Planet. Planet's on the top of my ticker list on my phone. You can go find Planet on the NASDAQ. And it's now 2024. So it's been a 14 year journey from startup to today. And amazing what you've built. But let's go back. So you and I met each other again back on the campus of NASA Ames at Singularity University. And what was that? What was that formative moment like for you and your co-founders?

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, look, the thing that had happened was that my colleague at NASA had kept on holding up his phone. This is the early smartphone in 2000.

• 24:47Peter Diamandis?

  Was it a Google? Google phone?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I don't know. And in his specific case, I don't know. But he would say, look, this has got most of what a satellite has. If you think about what's in a phone, it's got cameras, it's got GPS, it's got rate gyros, it's got accelerometers, it's got processors, radios. I mean, it's just crazy, all the stuff that is stuffed in here and it costs 500 bucks or a thousand bucks. Meanwhile, NASA is building these huge satellites. They also have roughly the same list of things, but they cost 500 million bucks or a billion bucks. And the quick thing we were like, what are those extra six zeros doing for us? And I'm not saying that nothing, no one was saying it's nothing.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  It's lower risk, it's a bigger, you know, telescope, it's a better sensor. But it's kind of remarkable how much stuff is bitten into this little box. And we wanted to leverage that. And NASA was very much in the mindset of inventing everything for itself because you know what? It had to send a man to the moon. Well, we didn't have computers, so we had to invent microcomputers. We didn't have, you know, solar panels, so we invented solar panels, you know, all that. We have to build everything from scratch. Well, guess what? The top R and D dollars aren't in NASA anymore. They're at Google, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, all the way. And so this is learning to follow for the space industry, not a comfortable place for the space industry. You know, we're used to leading from the front.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  You know, we were a little bit annoyed by this old idea of having to follow. But the fact is that the billions of dollars that have gone into miniaturization of electronics was super useful for space. So this is learning to take those, stuff them into much smaller satellites, much lower cost, but have much higher cost performance. That is data per unit dollar. And, you know, we estimate that that has changed orders of magnitude because of ours and others' efforts. I mean, at least three orders of magnitude. And that is a bit like the mainframe computer to desktop computer revolution, but for space. And just like the mainframe computer to desktop revolution, it's going to change the whole dynamics of what's possible in space. And this is just the beginning. We're seeing communication satellites and earth imaging satellites take off, right?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  But there's going to be others as well, better GPS navigation systems. You're going to see, you know, better radar systems, better, so many things are going to take off because of the fact that you've got much more capability per dollar. Also, launch costs have come down about four X in the same period, so that has helped as well. Although a common misconception, I think, is that that's the dominant thing that's led to this. Actually, it's kind of the other way around. Satellites, miniaturizing, has enabled us to put much more capability per kilogram that's going up. And that has changed the demand for going up, which enables us to bring the cost down. I would say it's much more that way around than the other way around. We still benefit and they, and they, they add on to one another.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  But, you know, the thousand X in the space industry, this happened is not to do with the launch. It's to do with the miniaturization and, and increasing capabilities, performance of satellites. Per unit dollar, per unit kilogram. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It, it, the specific performance of satellites has gone through the roof. That phase change enables lots of different applications and most of. In the field of some sort of data, because you're remote, it's all about collecting data or transmitting data. And just in the last five years, we've seen more than a tenfold increase in amount of data from space and more than a tenfold increase in the amount of data around orbit. Because with communication satellites, enabling communication on one side of the planet to the other. That's a total revolution, that. Ten X in both of those areas.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  So the upshot of the space revolution is a data revolution.

• 28:36Peter Diamandis?

  So but there was that moment. Was it Robbie, who was your co-founder at that time?

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Robbie and Chris Boschhausen.

• 28:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and both a great, amazing. How old were you guys when you were?

• 28:47Speaker 03

  So we were late twenties when we started that and we were like, okay, so phones, they work. And let's put them in a vacuum, let's stick them on the side of a rocket.

• 28:57Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that conversation. I remember you saying, we stick this thing in the vacuum chamber and see if it still works afterwards.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we did. It was funny because, I mean, that's like going back to the womb for these guys. Because actually, all the electronics are made in a vacuum. You know, that's what people don't appreciate. And they're made like, I mean, little like brick shit houses, these things. You can drop them, they still work.

• 29:19Peter Diamandis?

  They fall out of airplanes, they land.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Well, airplanes still work. I mean, they're kind of robust. So we stuck it on the side of a rocket, it also still worked. We eventually put three into orbit. I almost got fired by Pete Warden because I hadn't really got all the things in a row to do that. I most of the NASA didn't know that we were doing this and kind of freaked out when they found out. But we were like, no, this is going to be cool. We're going to show that we consume electronics can work in space. And that can change the whole cost equation here. So, yeah, we launched three phones into space. They've worked. They were tumbling around.

• 29:56Peter Diamandis?

  So I want you to back up a second here. So you have the idea. You and Robbie and Chris start, was it Planet Labs at the beginning?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, no, this phone project was at NASA.

• 30:08Peter Diamandis?

  This was an internal NASA project. Internal NASA project. Government funding just to see, and by the way.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  My leg.

• 30:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, stolen work hours, if you would, nights and weekends. And so you send up three and it works.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  They work. And then they're tumbling around, taking pictures. We got people with Yagi antennas all around the world picking up the packets because we don't have ground stations. They send us the packets. We reconfigure these pictures and like, okay, we take pictures from space for a few thousand dollars, not a few bazillion dollars. So, okay, this is kind of interesting. Maybe we should leave NASA and do something like this. I mean, the cameras on this wasn't the right kind of images. It was more proof of principle. It's a proof of principle that this technology could work in space. So then, yeah, we left NASA to start Planet. Actually, it's initially called Cosmogia.

• 30:59Peter Diamandis?

  That's right.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  A few years in. And we launched then.

• 31:05Peter Diamandis?

  So where'd you go first? Was it, was, was Steve your first investor then?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he was. And we started building and launching our satellite, first satellite. We put the deposit down on a rocket with our own pocket money.

• 31:17Peter Diamandis?

  Which rocket was that?

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Huh? There was an Antares rocket. And we actually put down two, one on Antares, one on Soyuz. Wouldn't be popular these days. We're not meant to use the Russians. But then we could and we did. And so we put the deposit down, but there was no way we were going to afford the main cost of the launch. And so we were like, oh shit, we need to get some money. That was when I was reminded, because one of the times we were launching one of these phone sets, it was in the Nevada Blackrock Desert, right in the way of Burning Man. And when there's not Burning Man, there's sometimes rocket, amateur rocketeers go up there and launch things into space because there's a, there's a very high.

• 31:58Peter Diamandis?

  Aerospace, yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Aerospace. So they can do that. And of course, there's no one around. And they, so we were up there and, and Steve was helping us to put our rocket together or something. I didn't know who he was, but he blogged about what we did the next day. And that was when Pete found out about our phone set project and almost fired me because he was like, I just read you guys are putting phones in space. And we're like, okay, calm down. It's gonna be fine.

• 32:26Peter Diamandis?

  For those who don't know, Pete Warden was the head of NASA Ames. He was a general in the Air Force. He was part of the Strategic Defense Initiative back in the eighties under Reagan. A dear co-conspirator in the entire spaceflight revolution and a dear friend.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  And because I'm a bit of a peace-loving hippie that prefers peace in space, not SDI in space. I think I won because he was working at NASA. He says he won because I work for him. I was under by that anyway. But yeah, Robbie, Chris and I said at this point, let's spin this out as a company. We took our core spacecraft team. We replaced everyone at NASA first because we wanted to do goodbye by NASA. And we took our core team. Steve kindly, having routed us out. We went to him and said, come on, you've got to give us some money for this. And he was like, okay, you guys are just crazy enough. I've only done one space investment before. It just a year or two earlier, invested in SpaceX, first money into SpaceX.

• 33:28Peter Diamandis?

  Steve Jervetson, one of the most brilliant venture capitalists on the board of SpaceX, had been on the board of Tesla and has the most magnificent space collectibles collection of Russian and NASA components and hardware and meteorites and everything. Yeah, he's great. How much did you get in the first round? Do you remember?

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Oh, that was, yeah, three million seed. Then he led also the A, which is another 12 million, I want to say. And but then also had some participation from other people. So did the seed. He led the first two and then the B was led by Yuri Milner, 50 million. No, he put in 30 or 50 or something. And then the C round was Data Collective and International Finance Corporation and a bunch of others. And then the round was essentially instigated because we bought the satellite arm of Google. Google then became.

• 34:27Peter Diamandis?

  So slow it, slow it down. So during that time.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Second, it's the nature of satellites.

• 34:34Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, in that window of time, this is 2010 to 2016, 18 timeframe. Both of us were. Close friends with Larry and Sergey and Eric Schmidt, where you were on the campus there of NASA Ames, which is where Google keeps their airplanes and I had Singularity University there. And talk about sort of the first time you connected with the Google guys and start talking about orbiting satellites and things like that.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, it was a little bit random. And in 2006 or '07, when I first got to Ames, I like hiking on the weekends. And I hiked from my house where we started Planet and did the first satellite in the garage to the sea, which turns out to be quite a hike. And I hadn't really exactly planned it out with my girlfriend at the time, about an 80 kilometer, 50 mile hike, two day from there to the sea. So basically over the mountains to Big Basin and then down to the sea. By the time we got there, there was no, there was only one bus a day and it left. We just missed it. Cell phones didn't work there because we're in the middle of nowhere. So we get to this beach and we're like, damn,

• 35:48Speaker 03

  how exactly are we going to get out of here? And my girlfriend was basically divorcing me at this point. So that's a bad plan. Anyway, so we're coming down to this beach and I say, well, I hope these guys are friendly because there's three people on the beach kitesurfing. And one of them turns out to be a friend of mine called Don Montague, who is a wonderful guy and helped to teach Sergey and Larry to kite surf. And it was the other two people were Sergey and Larry. And when they came in off their boards, I was like, oh, hi, Don, great to see you. Can you give me a lift home? And he was like, no, I'm not going your way, but these guys are. I'm in the car with my girlfriend and Sergey

• 36:30Speaker 03

  and Larry, who are giving me a ride home now. And they're like, can you stop, can we stop for dinner? I was like, of course, sure, let's stop for dinner. And we get chatting. And and and my girlfriend's like, what do you guys do? And they're like, we work at Google. How they put it. And I was like, wait a second. Their name's Larry and Sergey and they work at Google. Okay. I think I know who this is. And and she's like, well, what do you do exactly at Google? And they're like, well, you know, set war strategy or something. I'm kicking around to the table going, I think these are the guys that started it. Anyway, became friends with those guys um um early on and they got very interested in space.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  And came around to see our lunar lander demo to do, see some of the um missions that we were uh like the one we slammed into the South Pole of the moon looking for water. They came around for even though it was landing in the middle of the night, two or three AM and they came. Yeah, so they're very interested in that stuff. So they followed what we did.

• 37:24Peter Diamandis?

  This is where sometimes serendipity and good luck plays a hand.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 37:29Peter Diamandis?

  So you start Planet and uh and Steve invests. And when do you start sniffing around the fact that Google had satellites?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Well, they bought a Terabella or Sky Skybox imaging, which became Terabella. Um um I want to say in twenty fifteen. And and so they bought that to start a satellite arm and they actually were sniffing around us too at the time. And we we wanted to stay separate and they um bought this arm. And well, we thought it was fine and they were going to do that. Of course, it's a little bit competitive.

• 38:08Peter Diamandis?

  Now, Skybox at that time was was the sub one meter resolution image. These are larger, much more expensive satellites.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  I was saying of the zoom in because then subsequently, Google decided not to continue that investment and spin that out. They came and approached us and and um Eric, uh who was then an investor, um had had suggested that we have a discussion on that. And we did. And then one thing led to another and we ended up um uh buying their satellite arm, not for for cash. Google has plenty of cash and we had very little. So it made more sense for us to give stock in exchange for those assets and then Google came and shut up.

• 38:47Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everyone, I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day. It's Seed's DSO1 Daily Synbiotic. Hopefully by now you understand that your microbiome and your gut health are one of the most important modifiable parts of your health. Your gut microbiome is connected to everything, your brain health, your cardiac health, your metabolic health. So the question is, what are you doing to optimize your gut? Let me take a moment to tell you about what I'm doing. Every day, I take two capsules of Seed's DSO1 Daily Synbiotic. It's a two-in-one probiotic and prebiotic formulation that supports digestive health, gut health, skin health, heart health, and more.

• 39:31Peter Diamandis?

  It contains 24 clinically and scientifically proven probiotic strains that are delivered in a patented capsule that actually protects the contents from your stomach acid and ensures that 100% of it is survivable, reaching your colon. Now, if you want to try Seed's DSO1 Daily Synbiotic for yourself, you can get 25% off your first month's supply by using the code PETER25 at checkout. Just go to seed.com/moonshots and enter the code PETER25 at checkout. That's seed.com/moonshots and use the code PETER25 to get your 25% off the first month of Seed's Daily Synbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you.

• 40:15Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's go back to the episode.

• 40:17Peter Diamandis?

  Do you still call the smaller satellites doves?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:20Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. And describe those small satellites.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're about this big. They weigh about five or seven kilograms, so 10 or 15 pounds. They spread their wings out to...

• 40:34Peter Diamandis?

  They're solar panels.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  They're solar panels, exactly, yeah. And they chirp a little bit from there. Actually, we get data rates of 2 gigabits a second over 1,000 kilometer range from our little radios now.

• 40:48Peter Diamandis?

  That's amazing. What altitude are you flying at? I mean, people need to know, the lower the altitude, the better the resolution, the better com rate, but the degradation, you degrade in orbit.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 41:00Peter Diamandis?

  What's your trade there?

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, our trade is we choose about a three-year life. Our thinking is that just like you don't want a three-year-old phone in your pocket, you don't want a three-year-old satellite in space. It starts to become obsolete. And just the same, actually, really, every, uh, uh, we, we've launched on average four times. We've launched thirty-five rockets, over five hundred satellites. Um, we launched on average four times a year. And every time, we're iterating the technology to make it better and better. Just like every time you buy a new phone, it's got the bigger camera, a better, better hard drive, whatever, we're doing the same. And we call that strapping space to Moore's law to make it better and better in that, eh, that place of data per dollar, you know, which is the sort of the, the vector we're trying, the, the, the metric we're trying to optimize.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Um, so, uh, we've seen a ten thousand-fold increase from our first satellite to our satellite today in terms of data per dollar.

• 41:53Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, that's, that's incredible. I mean, that is, that is a Moore's law. Um, and, and are you mostly launching on SpaceX these days or?

• 42:03Speaker 03

  SpaceX, um, uh, we've, we've launched on thirty-five, uh, thirty-five times on ten different rocket vehicles. Um, but indeed SpaceX and the PSLV, I think SpaceX has been our most common one of all.

• 42:14Peter Diamandis?

  PSLV is India, right?

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, and but we've launched on other vehicles as well, the European Vega, the US Atlas, others.

• 42:23Peter Diamandis?

  And when you, I mean, when Starship starts, uh, I mean, you could launch all two hundred at once.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  No, we could launch like ten thousand at once. Uh, it's crazy.

• 42:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's crazy. I mean, I, you know, I do worry about the A three eighty problem with that. Like, it's not clear that there's yet a market for that vehicle. Uh, it's not impedance matched with people's ability to build satellites yet. The only satellite fleet that can fill it up at the minute is really Starlink itself. But then that doesn't help, uh, you know, they're, they're only their own customer, you know?

• 43:00Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, do, do you, do you feel, um, I mean, it, what? Planet used to have the biggest, baddest, most satellites on orbit.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Larger satellite fleet, but Elon came over and did more. Yeah, I know, it's, uh, kind of annoying. Their biggest allies and he's got more of them. I it's I'm pretty outraged by this. No, it's good. I look, we're all obviously trying to do uh things to help the planet. And I commend what they have done with Starlink, it's uh and the ruckus, of course, the reusability. I was a doubter on that. I thought the reusability was too hard and he did it.

• 43:34Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, you and I have both been for the last twenty five years, space cadets, and it was always the holy grail of reusability.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:41Peter Diamandis?

  It was.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  We pulled it off.

• 43:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and he pulled it off. Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  We always think of this as Elon, of course, is a huge team and but Elon, of course, has been an inspiring leader for them to do that.

• 43:53Peter Diamandis?

  You know, um, this past three years, we got Elon to fund a hundred million dollar gigaton carbon removal X Prize. They try and stem the tide of uh of the environmental destruction.

• 44:11Peter Diamandis?

  And you have become an extraordinarily outspoken individual on the environment. And I think part of what you're trying to do with Planet is give us the tools to measure the planet in a way that allows us to hold companies, individuals, dictators, nation states responsible for the impact they're having because despite the borders that exist, they don't prohibit the uh the free movement of pollutants and and CO2. So talk a little bit about that for so if if if people listening um

• 44:50Peter Diamandis?

  are not convinced uh or need some persuasion on the the state of affairs, give us your best shot.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  No, I mean, look, the the from our um ten thousand foot view, or in our case, four hundred kilometer view, we see the whole planet and I see it evolving. Um, the facts are stark. Um, and Humans have obviously manipulated the planet. We've got two big problems. The one that everyone knows about and the one that everyone doesn't. The one that everyone knows about is climate and how we are emitting

• 45:30Speaker 03

  too much CO2 and it's warming the planet. And obviously, we're having extreme weather events now. That's exactly what the scientists have said. It's the first thing you get is that and of course, sea level rising, whole nation states being wiped out. The second is biodiversity loss. And this is where we're wiping out ecosystems of life. And you might think, well, why does that matter to humans? I mean, they're just up there, some whatever, some animals in the jungle. Why does it matter for us? It matters for us because it is estimated that half our economy depends upon what they call nature services,

• 46:11Speaker 03

  which is that the trees and the soils and the mycelium and the plants clean our water and they clean our air and they do all these things. And we don't have the industrial capability to replace that. We don't have the technology. We are fully, fully dependent on the rest of life. And in the last 40 years, in my lifetime, we've wiped out 70% of the life on the earth. 82% of wild mammals, gone in 40 years. 75% of fish in freshwater rivers and lakes, gone in the last 40 years. 70% of insects, gone in the last 40 years.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  66% of birds, over half the coral reefs, over half the forests, all gone. And we think- Irretrievably gone. And we think we can do that without there being consequences for us. We are so naive. And what is driving that? Is deforestation, overfishing, it's human pollutions from agriculture into rivers. It's all these sort of things. And that is just a big problem as climate change. And they couple, of course, to make things worse. So now the the Amazon is not any longer a net CO2 sucker because of the climatic events.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  And then that means it's more likely to fall over as an ecosystem. We are dealing with a complicated system. Humans need to aforest, reforest a lot of the land. We need to stop our overfishing. We need to do these things. And there's things humans, individuals can do for this, right? We've got to, you know, reduce our intake of meat, which is what drives 70% of deforestation is for cows. We've got to reduce our, of course, use of fossil fuels and those things. And we've got to, there's things we could do to help as well, like helping in our local parks to plant trees, to help rewild local parks.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  I'm involved with a project that is just rewilding an area about 1,000 hectares north of here in San Francisco to try and bring back the native ecosystems after over usage, both mining and over cattle usage of an area that wiped out most of the natives. It's hard work and I wanted to understand what it takes on the ground because we're trying to help people with satellite imagery all over the world to do this conservation effort. But yeah, no, the situation is somewhat tragic. What I would say is we have wicked problems and we have wicked tools to go help them. And our aim at Planet is to to help provide everyone those tools. Let me give you an example.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  We are trying to switch to a sustainable economy. For that, we basically have to measure nature and carbon and put it into our economic system. At the end of every year, every company and every country on the planet is going to need to balance its carbon books, just like you balance your finances. And just like doing that, of course, the first step is measuring where the carbon is, whereas it's all in your supply chain. You can all do a personal carbon budget. You'll find that flying around is probably the worst bit, as I did. But you need to balance that budget. Well, how do you offset your carbon of your flights or whatever? Well, you can grow trees, you can change, transition farms to sustainable farming practices.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Well, how do you know that's happening when you do that? Well, you need satellite data that can do that. We just launched, just a few weeks ago, it's one of my proudest launches for Planet, Best Moments, not a rocket launch, but a launch of a data product called Forest Carbon Planetary Variable. We are measuring the carbon across the whole forests of the Earth and helping to quantify how much carbon is in the trees. And we're actually doing it at three by three meter level every quarter and going back 10 years. And that means pretty much each tree will be able to say how much carbon is in the tree. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because if we're going to have carbon markets where Microsoft says,

• 50:32Speaker 03

  I want to offset my carbon of all my execs flying around. And some people in the Amazon say, well, we'll plant some trees or stop deforestation in my area. Somebody needs to act as the bridge that says, indeed, they have done that. And how much carbon has increased, right? You need a carbon economy and we've been lacking that. But it all depends on this core measurement.

• 50:55Peter Diamandis?

  So you make possible, actually, an X Prize I've wanted to do for a while. I've wanted to do, for lack of a better term, the Trillion Trees X Prize, which is, any team can register and can claim a plot of land where they're going to plant trees.

• 51:14Peter Diamandis?

  They've got to have permission from the landowner, could be a government location and so forth. And we measure, and hopefully there are thousands of teams in a hundred, a hundred plus countries around the world, and we measure who wins. Now, one wins by getting the most, but there's this massive long tail over the course of a decade.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  You know, I'm a big fan of your, your prizes because I think they incentivize innovation as well as much more capital in than the prizegivers give. It's kind of amazing what happens. Yeah, I, I think you could even do it by carbon. Of course, you have to restrict it by, and there was a mistake a little bit in New Zealand where they, they tried to do this based on carbon, and then everyone planted pine trees, which turned out to be fastest at adding carbon, but they were not native, they hurt a lot of the other species, and then when the wind blew, they all fell down. And so you have to do the right kind of trees, but yes, subject to certain caveats, you want to incentivize people to do that. Also to restore existing forest, you people have taken a few trees out, or so, yeah, we can, the idea is to be able to measure that to underpin carbon markets or carbon prizes, the kind you were just saying.

• 52:21Peter Diamandis?

  Love it. Well, we have a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs, people who've got big ideas, what I dare call exponential entrepreneurs. Could you mind sharing some of your lessons learned? Like, in some of the challenges or problems, or like, you know, what was it that led you to this extraordinary success of, of building this? You know, and now as a public company CEO and a company, frankly, that has 100x growth potential as you measure the world. It's huge. It's a data company. It's an AI company that uses satellite technology. But the journey could not have been easy. What were some of the lessons learned? What's

• 53:05Peter Diamandis?

  the advice you have for entrepreneurs out there?

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Well, look, I think the biggest thing is that it takes time, grit, and endurance.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  They, you know, a lot of people list all the things that differentiate good startups and bad startups, the right idea, the right timing, all these things. I'd say by far the biggest one is endurance. As you put it to me once, and it's one of the safest pieces of advice I ever received. And it was to do with your project and the first X Prize, the Ansari X Prize. You said for eight years,

• 53:44Speaker 03

  No one noticed what you were doing, basically. No one even figured it out. Maybe, I remember you showing me a little clip from the LA Times that was like this big on page forty. How proud you were that somebody had, you know, it was something like that. And I was like, wow, you know, Peter's great. And then two years later, it was front page of every, every headline on the planet.

• 54:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  And it, the exponentials are hard to understand and they, you know, the humans don't have good intuition for it, as you've explained many times. And so towards the end, you get a big effect that you, so you could do, you know, and as the, as the Silicon Valley adage goes, you, you, you always underestimate what you can do in a year, uh, sorry, overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in ten. It takes ten, no, but the safe piece of advice, I should say, is the thing you said. It take, because of that experience, it takes ten years to do anything meaningful in the world. Ten years.

• 54:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you had, you had eleven year from, come up with the idea until the company went public. X Prize, X Prize was eleven years for me too.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  It's ten, twelve years. If you're tackling a problem that's actually gonna have serious impact in the world, not just a frivolous thing, and, and, and it's not gonna happen in a year. It's gonna happen in ten. So, wow, you know, that, that, that's just a reality, I think. And there's huge rewards for it, but you have to stick with it. And the number of people that told me no, was, you know, I could, I can't even count, right? I mean, no, you can't do it. No, you can't have money. No, there's no business. No, there's, you can't build a satellite. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I had to keep going, you know, and our team had to weather through that, right?

• 55:32Speaker 03

  And that's, it takes a certain sense of endurance as well as, as idea and timing, uh, and all the rest of it, which obviously you need too, but, um, and luck, a whole heap of luck, right? I mean, um, you know, I mentioned the Sergey and Larry thing. I mean, what the heck? Right place at the right time, like, so some of that just.

• 55:53Peter Diamandis?

  But one would say luck comes from perseverance as well. Like you stick around long enough.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Totally, totally. And to take risks, right? Um, so, so, yeah, nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that. Um, so I definitely. Would say you've got to stick with it. The other thing I would say is tackle something that's meaningful in the world. Life's too short. Don't ever start the strategy that looks like this. I will do this thing, which doesn't sound that interesting. Cool tech, but really the main thing is I'll get rich and then I'll be a philanthropist and give the money away. Such bullshit.

• 56:32Peter Diamandis?

  I agree. It's ridiculous.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  It's that vote with your feet. Do something useful every day. Don't wait a few years until you're rich enough to then do cool stuff. Do cool stuff with your feet. You know, there's, you know, I gave a talk at Stanford, so I have a basic test for that.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  If you should be able to, whatever your idea is, you should be able to look at the UN Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, and check a few that that goal, that project helps. And if you can't, if the answers are null set, you should be looking seriously at that idea, you know? And let me be honest, like, there's a lot of apps in Silicon Valley that maybe are companies.

• 57:15Peter Diamandis?

  No more photo, no more photo sharing apps, please.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. What the heck? That may make money and it is perfectly waste of time. And I used to think of this as like, okay, well, that's cool. Different people do different things and that's helpful. Except when you think about all the challenges of the planet, we can't waste loads of the best engineers. This is what gives me pain about a Facebook right now. And I don't mean to pick them out, but like, I don't see, it's not clear it's net positive to the world. And again, you could say, well, it doesn't matter. Cool stuff, cool tech. I'm sure some interesting tech will come out of it. There's definitely good, but there's definitely bad in terms of ruining our information ecology of the, with, with, you know, echo chambers and stuff.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  But I think it's much worse than that. You are putting forty thousand or whatever it is, engineers who aren't solving the world's problems. They're just helping us to share pictures? What the fuck? I mean, there's people starving on the planet. I'm sorry. You know, just not where we need to be putting our time and resources when we have, you know, a half a billion people that are undernourished, a climate change challenge, biodiversity loss, all the problems that we have in the world. So life's too short. If it doesn't hit one of the big goals for the planet, don't do it.

• 58:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the way I put it is if you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. And the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 58:45Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life

• 59:29Peter Diamandis?

  was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building twenty around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. Hundred fifty gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning.

• 1:00:03Peter Diamandis?

  When it's solvable, you're gonna find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire

• 1:00:48Peter Diamandis?

  family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode.

• 1:01:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I'll close out with something else. We just landed on the moon, which is fun. First commercial, private commercial vehicle to make it. And you and I have been lunites for quite some time. You were involved with Pete Warden on a few, shall we say, undercover unusual lunar missions. Area 51 lunar mission, yeah. Yeah, to crash into the South Pole and image the lunar poles looking for ice in permanently shadowed areas, because ice is the Saudi oil fields of the moon, liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

• 1:01:50Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I just announced on a podcast, I went back with Bill Gross from Idealeab, and we talked about the blast-off lunar mission we had worked on for a number of years. And of course, Google Lunar X Prize that you were familiar of. We had 2016, three made attempts. And intuitive was the fourth team that made an attempt and it pulled it off.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  They stuck the landing.

• 1:02:17Peter Diamandis?

  They stuck it. Yeah. Amazing. Makes you, makes you proud. Now, wasn't quite, you know, the lunar rover in 1972 bouncing around with humans, but, but just like your phone sat has evolved, this, the, the evolution of what we'll see is both, especially as Starship gets to the moon is going to be awesome. Are you still a lunite over Mars guy?

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Oh God, yeah. Yeah. It's not only, it's like a, a thousand times easier to put a settlement on the moon than Mars. Look, I, I mean, I, I think we've mainly got to pay attention to this planet, but I mean, the moon is inspiring to me. I think that it's a place where I, I would love to visit there and look back at the, how big the earth is in the sky, four times wider than the moon is in our sky and see the continents and, um, and get that perspective that I think that helps, um, people to understand our place. I, it, but, but practically and technically it is just far easier than Mars because Mars had, has the annoying thing of an atmosphere, which for,

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  for spacefaring species is really annoying. It's only useful if you can actually breathe it, which you can't on Mars. If you can't breathe it, then it just makes landing and taking off much harder. You still have to wear a spacesuit. You can't land and take off. And the moon is one and a half or two days or three days travel time, whereas Mars is eight months and you can go any day of the week. Uh, which makes a big difference.

• 1:03:42Peter Diamandis?

  Two point four second round trip by the speed of light. You can have a conversation.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Exactly. You can have a conversation, whereas you can't on Mars. I mean, just the difficulty delta is orders of magnitude, orders of magnitude. I think, you know, we did this estimate, um, there's workshops, um, uh, uh, when we're, um, at Ames where we estimated even with star, uh, with, with Falcon nine, forget Starship. We, and by the way, Falcon nine is perfectly adequate for this. You could put a settlement on the moon with, that we think would be self sustaining, being able to do its core, things of being able to mend everything that would break, that would be life system critical, um, for a couple of billion dollars. What the heck? That's, that seems like a reasonable, uh, why wouldn't we do that? Um, and.

• 1:04:30Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I mean, it's, it's something an individual can do, right? Elon or, or Bezos.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Some of our friends can do that and they wouldn't even notice it disappeared from their bank account.

• 1:04:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, look, again, most of our energy has got to be on Terra Pharma. We've got so many challenges, but it's inspiring. And I think it makes sense at that sort of scale to have a backup plans for humanity. So, yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  The same, exactly. Yeah, if I could just riff off that, at least that, yeah, the, the, the, it's a tool. It's a enable, but it's an ecosystem for sure. There's no way we can do all the applications as one company that have how to help use this data to help make smarter decisions or help make lives better around the planet. There's just a billion companies that could be built off the top of this that, that, you know, we, an application. So, yeah, AI makes it easier as well. So you don't have to have, again, a PhD in satellite imagery processing to get to grips with this. This is a standard API.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  You say your AOI, your area of interest, your time of interest, your TOI, and then we'll just give you the data or even we'll give you analytic speeds, like how much carbon is in all the trees or, or where all the ships or whatever. And we'll just give you lat longs and these things. This is getting easier and easier. And so I, I think we're successful only, not only we, we can enable that. We're only successful as a planet. If we help companies to do that as an ecosystem, this is like the iPhone App Store, but for building solutions to help the planet.

• 1:06:50Peter Diamandis?

  I was gonna, I was gonna say that, yeah.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  I want thousands of eco entrepreneurs, as Marc Benioff likes to say, of entrepreneurs that are focused on helping the planet, building off of the top of planet's data. You know, I mean, let me say one other thing, look. We do have real, as I said, we've got wicked problems, wicked technologies to help solve them.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  I'm going to disagree with your abundance thing a little bit here. We have, some of those problems are so acute that I think that we're going to need technology solutions like renewable energy and better data solutions. And we're going to have to

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  consume less material resources because there's no, that you can get more digital resources, but you can't consume more than we're presently consuming. It's eating the planet. That's what we're seeing. The mining, even if you swap the renewable energy, for example, that we're seeing all the mining for lithium for more batteries. In the end, we also just need to eat a little less, waste less, you know, we waste 45% of our food. We need to conserve a little bit more on electricity and things. That combination is what we're going to need to get out of here. It's a matter of smart use of our present stuff, smart technologies like renewable energy and smart use of our present staff, including a personal behavior level. We're going to have to change our behavior a little bit.

• 1:08:14Peter Diamandis?

  I, I respect the reduction in waste and I respect the increase in efficiency. And I think for the first time ever, we've got the tools to begin to think that through that and to do that. So listen, if you're a moonshot entrepreneur and you're trying to figure out your next gig, what would you do? With an incredible information layer on top of the earth that is getting deeper and richer and accessible through APIs and AI engines. I can start imagining a whole slew of different startups I'd be doing. So maybe it's a little bit of inspiration.

• 1:08:53Peter Diamandis?

  Again, thank you to you, Will, to Robbie, to Chris for founding Planet. A real pleasure to have you as a friend and so proud of what you've built.

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  Thanks a lot, Peter. It's been a pleasure to have this conversation with you today.

• 1:09:17Speaker 06

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