What satellite imaging reveals about the Earth & will Elon take us to Mars?
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.

Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night. Cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest State of Trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. And that's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches.

And Vanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant. So stop stressing over cybersecurity and start focusing on growing your business in 2025. Check out Vanta and let them handle the tough stuff. Head to vanta.com forward slash the times tech to learn more.

Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Before we get to the business of the day, what's up with the frogs? I assume they're frogs now. Yeah, yeah. They're doing really, really well. They've been released into the pond.

Because I was getting so fed up of having tadpoles in the kitchen. That's fair. And when they were turning into frogs, some of them were drowning. I think we did have little stones in there for them to sit on, but they lose their gills when they become frogs and they need to breathe. So some of them were dying and then the tadpoles were eating them, which was just even more disgusting. Ah.

Were you ever tempted to do like a David Attenborough narration of the cannibalization of your tadpoles with the other tadpoles and frogs? That might have cheered me up because actually what ended up happening was I'd come down in the morning at six o'clock and find these tiny little dead frogs. And then I'd have to get like a ladle and pull these little bodies out of the tank.

So at that point, I'd lost all my sense of humour. I wasn't thinking about David Attenborough at all. This little one won't make it. Hasn't made it. His stomach is slashed open. He's being devoured by his brothers and sisters.

Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Danny Fortson. Danny in the Valley. And you, Katie Prescott. Katie in the very hot city of London. Very hot city. We're having a heat wave. That happens over there? One day, one day in May, it's going to be 30 degrees.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. What are you guys going to do? Well, you know what everyone will do? They'll take their tops off, go to the park, get very, very sunburnt and very, very drunk and go completely insane for a day until it starts raining on Friday. What do you do in a heat wave? You just walk outside and go, you know, go get a...

A matcha or a boba tea or something. You know, it's like that's every day out here. You don't feel the need to go to the pub and drink 20 pints of beer. No, it's like, oh, that yellow orb is in the sky. Let's go get hammered. Well, speaking of the weather. Go on. This is my shift. On a nice hot day or when the sun's out, would you go golfing ever? Are you a golfer? What do you think? Yeah.

Here's the answer to that question. Oh, I feel like I'm being set up here. I don't think you're a golfer. I'm not a golfer. I think I've been to the 19th hole that they call the pub, the bar. Yeah. Yeah. But a bit of crazy golf in my time. Why do you ask? There is a method to my madness. The reason I ask is because there's a really interesting golfing story that came out of obviously North Korea. Yeah.

All right. It's a tech pod. Where am I going? You must be thinking. So I said golfing story has nothing really to do with golf. It has more to do with launching missiles. And when I say launching missiles, I don't mean, you know, a drive down the center of the fairway. There was a large golf course being built in North Korea. And it turns out it's actually probably a site to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles there.

With nuclear warheads. Oh, wow. In disguise. In disguise. Correct. Because, you know, the whole vibe of North Korea, never been there, obviously, doesn't seem like, hey, let's go golfing, everybody. Life is easy. You know, the ultimate leisure undertaking. But yeah, apparently you can see from space this strange golf course being built. And there are telltale signs that this is, in fact, not a golf course, but a new kind of

nuclear military installation. Did you know, Danny, King John Il once reportedly hit 38 under par? No way! At a course in Pyongyang, yeah. Is that before or after he was elected with 99.7% of the popular vote? I understand that statistic more than I understand what 38 under par means, which is...

Calamar producers written here. But basically, I think what they found is that the course was actually just these concrete bases and they're very thin layer of soil over it. And these military analysts are like, that's not a golf course. These are launch pads for ballistic missiles. And so basically using golf as a cover story. And why are you telling me this? I mean, it's a great story. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, because the imagery those analysts used were generated by a company called Planet.

And today's interview is with the CEO of Planet, a British man named Will Marshall. And you will definitely have come across their work before, maybe without even knowing it. Really? It goes beyond golf courses, does it? It goes beyond golf courses. They are not a golf imagery specialist. I thought it would be best to just go straight into the interview today. And we can have a chat afterwards because there's lots going on in space.

around planet, Elon Musk, AI, the future of humanity. But rather than kind of spoil it all, I figure we can just kind of get right into it. That sounds great. I can't wait to hear it. Yeah. So I started the conversation with Will asking him about that North Korea story and how it was possible for analysts to uncover the kind of the mystery with their imagery.

We have launched a fleet of satellites, we have about 200 in orbit, three different types of satellites, but the main set, about 180 of the satellites, image the entire Earth's landmass and a lot of the ocean too, but not all of it, but certainly on the landmass we cover it all once a day. You know, if you know what you want to look for, it's very easy to take a satellite picture and

But in many cases, there are other things that you don't know you need to look for. And if you look at everything, you can start finding those things. In the intelligence community, this is called the unknown unknowns, you know, versus the known knowns. Like known objects of the known type. So you know what you're looking for and you know where to look.

You're just trying to keep track of it. Okay, great. That's one quadrant of what one cares about. But it goes down to the other side of it, the unknown unknowns, which is you didn't know you needed to look there and you didn't know you needed to look for that.

and that unveils different use cases. In this case, yes, potential cover stories of a golf course for nuclear complex. You can see things though by correlation in those areas and people can pick up on that. We have a forensic capability because we do this daily scan. We can look back in time, we can see what it's correlated with and other indications that it may not just be a golf course. So

We are really enabling the intelligence community to get towards their holy grail of unknown unknowns. It's pretty high fidelity, right? Each pixel is three square meters, roughly 10 foot chunks of the earth, which is really when you're talking about doing this from space, that's incredibly high fidelity. Can you talk about what...

that equivalent would have been pre-planet before you guys started doing this? Well, yeah. I mean, before planet, there was a NASA mission that actually did what its name suggests, covers the land, and it covers the land of the Earth,

when we started 30 meters every 16 days. So that means 10 times higher resolution spatially. But actually that means a hundred times more information per unit area because it's 10 by 10. And then it's 16 times more frequent. So

Subsequently, there's been some improvements in that the European Sentinel-2 system does it about once a week and about 10 meter resolution. So there's only 10 times more information and five times more frequent. So 50 times the sort of pixels times temporal frequency. So we're higher resolution, higher temporal resolution, if you like.

What those missions, though, still are really important for is calibrating because they have higher spectral accuracy and other things. So we actually radiometrically calibrate our satellites to those missions. So they serve a super important purpose.

And they often cover other spectral bands that we do not. The way I think about it is historically, satellite missions were doing science and awareness, and we've moved from awareness to action. Because if you want to take action on something,

Then you want data on a timescale relevant to human activities. And human activities take place on hours or days or weeks. And if you only take an image every month, you miss it. And so you can't do anything about it. You can't get inside the decision-making loop to fix the problem.

Our big mission in life is to help humanity to make smarter decisions because we have the data and the relevant timescale to enable smarter decisions, whether that's in sustainability and stopping and tracking illegal fishing or deforestation or in the security realm of tracking new threats and getting inside them before they cause a war.

Anybody who consumes any kind of regular diet of media will have seen some of your images, even though they don't know it's from planet. But anything that's kind of shows a before and after of like really high resolution, whether it's like recently it was the Palisades fire in Southern California or this like Korea story or stuff that's happening in Gaza. There can be quite stark, very high resolution images of anywhere in the world.

But it's something like, correct me if I'm wrong, about half of your business is government, military, intelligence, etc. Yeah. So we provide our data to the press to help illuminate events around the world. You know, they say a picture speaks a thousand words. And so sometimes when you're seeing a flood or a refugee crisis or whatever it is, you know, a picture can help explain that. People really help them understand what's

what's going on. Also, though, increasingly, they're being used to investigate pieces. Like if you can't send a journalist deep into China or into Afghanistan or something, and you're trying to investigate, well, our imagery can help that investigation. And in many cases, journalists have covered some really important things.

like Uyghur detention camps across China that they couldn't get to in person, but they could investigate using our data. So in that case, it's finding new news using our data, not just shedding light on news that is already known about. And in fact, that piece was in particular won the Pulitzer Prize for journalists. On your second place, yeah, our business actually, it's about 40 something percent defense and intelligence, 30 something percent civil government. And then

about the same, just under 30% for commercial. So we think about those three major categories. On the defense and intelligence side, it's those security threats I was mentioning, finding those new threats, keeping track of them. That's a new capability. On civil government, it's things like disaster response. Like you said, the LA fires. So there's a press element of that. But then there's actually helping the firefighters with information or the relief NGOs.

And we just announced last week a partnership with California, which is permit enforcement. So they are looking to do environmental regulation checking. And in this case, it uses this new technology of the Tanager spacecraft, the hyperspectral spacecraft, to look for methane leaks across all of California on a regular basis so they don't have to send people out. I see. I call it the speed camera for permit enforcement. You know, it's just much...

lower cost way of enforcing a regulation and in this case stopping methane pollution which is a waste for the energy companies or the oil and gas companies or whatever and bad for the environment so it's a win-win and then on the

commercial side, it's ag companies trying to improve crop yields, it's energy companies, it's insurance companies trying to do parametric drought insurance or things like that. So yeah, there's a wide range of uses across those three sectors. And I've seen you guys, I don't know if you guys are still using this tagline or not, but this idea that basically what you are doing from space is

as creating something akin to like the Bloomberg terminal for planet Earth, i.e. anything you want to see at any place at any time in great detail, you can see. That's exactly right. I like that analogy because people often think, well, planet is a space company. And whilst we have satellites in space and all the trappings of a space company in the sense of doing that hardware thing,

From a business perspective, we're a data business. We provide data and analytics over a platform to our customers. That sounds and smells much more like a Bloomberg ad

or Nielsen or one of these data companies than it does a satellite company. Like to call Planet a space company would be like calling Google a server company because they do have lots of servers in the back end. But you don't think of Google as a server company.

You think of Google as a search company and as Gmail and Docs and whatever it is, those are the products that people get value from, right? Satellites are our back end, like servers are the back end for Google. People get more tripped up by this because the satellites are really exciting and I get excited by them. They're cool, right? They're cool. They're much cooler than servers. But in the end...

business is like a Bloomberg terminal. We are selling data streams that enable people to make smarter decisions, whether it's for economic return, whether it's for sustainability, whether it's for security, it's helping them make smarter decisions because they have this information flow. And that is like Bloomberg does for finance. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.

Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night. Cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest State of Trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. And that's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches.

And Vanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant. So stop stressing over cybersecurity and start focusing on growing your business in 2025. Check out Vanta and let them handle the tough stuff. Head to vanta.com forward slash the times tech to learn more.

Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies.

Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. By the time you hear about a data breach, your information has already been exposed for months. On average, companies take 277 days to report a breach.

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We were at NASA and I was in a little outfit that we helped to start called the Small Spacecraft Division, which was looking at how can we use small satellites

cheapest airlines to do missions that NASA wants to do, exploration, science, and so on. Initially, we had done a few missions. I was involved with a lunar mission, a science team, this one called LCROSS that looked for and found, in fact, water on the south pole of the moon. And that mission cost $79 million. $79 million.

Now, by NASA standards, that's extraordinarily cheap. Wildly cheap. Wildly cheap. In fact, it was the leftover change from another mission. NASA, literally, when we first discussed this idea of this mission, people said, well, you can't go to the moon for less than a billion dollars. Forget it.

And they really didn't believe that in some of the institutional settings in NASA. I mean, others did. And obviously, we got that funded. And it was trying to pioneer that. But then our colleague at NASA, Pete Kluper, kept on holding up the phone from his smartphones had just come out. This is like 2007, 2008. And he was holding up the smartphone.

the smartphone in his pocket and saying, well, wait a second. This has a lot of what a satellite needs in this phone now. It has GPS to know where you are. It has accelerometers for games and stuff. So it knows how it's oriented. It has radios. It has a computer. It has sensors like the cameras. It has lots of what you would list. And in fact, if you take the list of what is in a satellite and I take the list of what is in a smartphone, it's probably 90% overlap.

And he's like, okay, well this costs $500.

Our normal mission costs $500 million. So what are the extra six zeros doing exactly for us? And it prompted me and my colleague and co-founder of Planet that subsequently left, Chris Boschhausen, to sort of take that idea seriously. And we started a thing called PhoneSat with a lot of the founding team, many of whom still at Planet. We took about seven people from NASA and started the idea of

can we put phones in space? Could they work? And could they demonstrate that you could do satellites at a much lower cost? And we did. The phones worked. These are literally regular phones. And we managed to communicate with them. We put them into space. I almost got fired a few times. Wait, but hold on. Pause there. Pause there. So you fired phones into space. Correct. And was that like, hey, boss,

We're going to, you know, smuggle some phones into this rocket just to see. Or was that just a was that a classic? Let's ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Yeah, this is much more ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Except we had snuck the phones. We organized the rocket and we were doing all this and then.

Steve Jervison caught us out in the Back Rock Desert launching these on demonstrator rockets just to go suborbital, so up and down. Oh, yeah, yeah.

the acceleration and other survival aspects for these little satellites we were creating based on the phone, mainly the phone. And he blogged about it. We hadn't told him that it was sort of under the wraps project. Then the next day I get hauled into my NASA boss's office, Pete Ward, and he was like, what are you doing putting phones into space? I didn't say you could do that. Duh.

And I was like, hold on, boss. It's going to be great. You know, this is going to demonstrate how we're going to show that you could do satellites in a much, much lower cost way. And that could be really beneficial for NASA's mission. And after things cooled down a little bit, he accepted that we continue with this mission. And we did. And they launched and went. So it was meant to be under wraps and made for forgiveness. But actually it got cancelled.

outed by Steve, who then became our first major investor. And Steve, for those who don't know, is a kind of a pivotal investor in all things space, including SpaceX. And it's just like a big enthusiast and has been for years. That's right. So you launched those into space. And what was the test that you're like, oh,

Actually, maybe we could do something with this and create a company out of this. What worked that needed to work? Well, we could tell already from the early tests on the ground that the phones were going to do fine in space and that we could do satellites in a very different way based on consumer electronics.

NASA was used to the idea of building from scratch and designing and developing everything it used in a spacecraft because when NASA started... It was very artisanal. Everything was artisanal, right? Yeah, it was artisanal because they didn't have any other choice. When you were sending Apollo astronauts to the moon, they needed a microprocessor. Well, guess what?

Microprocessors didn't exist at the time, and so they had to develop a microprocessor. They needed power, so they had to invent solar panels and all this. So it's very, very different times now. We have billions of dollars being spent on microelectronics for phones, for laptops, for other devices.

And so this was changing to an era of the space sector following rather than leading on the development of all those subcomponents, right? And that was a very different shift. So we took a very different approach. It was different in that sense and it was different in a risk sense because our goal was if we're not sending a billion dollars on a satellite and certainly not if we're not sending humans out, we can take a very different risk approach. And if one of

One in 10 of those satellites doesn't work, no big deal. And that led to a lot more innovation. And so subsequently, we did leave NASA with that founding team who had done that phone set project. And we started Planet with the idea of doing Earth observation. And we had done an analysis of all the things we could do with low-cost satellites. We determined that Earth observation was the key one that could have the biggest impact on the world and that was underleveraged.

And so we tackled it and decided this daily scan of the whole Earth would be a huge benefit for a wide range of commercial sectors, impact missions, peace and security, and so on. And of course, concurrent with all of this was the kind of rise of SpaceX. And I was just wondering if you could also talk about...

The launch costs, where that was when you were at NASA versus what it is now and where you see it going. Because we've had people on this pod who are like, yeah, I'm going to mine asteroids. Oh, space hotels. We even had one guy on, also a Brit, who was trying to design a data center in space. Anyway, lots of crazy ideas, but it all feels like the frequency and cost of launch is

is the thing. Yeah. Well, it's been helpful. I think there's a misunderstanding that, I mean, personally, space geeks love to do space things. And so often they get interrupted by, but they're focused more on, on doing the space thing than doing a viable business. So, you know, asteroid mining was a canonical example of a, of a,

Theoretically, very interesting idea, practically absolutely not relevant to the time and place of where technology stands today. And so it doesn't pass basic business sense. But let me step back then and give a perspective. I say there's three major trends that are impacting space and what has happened. So first is launches coming down in cost.

the cost per kilogram has come down. From and to? It was when we started planning around $20,000 a kilogram. Now it's about $4,000 or $5,000 a kilogram. Second, we've seen cost performance increase per unit mass of satellites by about a thousand fold over that same time. What does that mean? That means we've taken satellites that were the size of a double-decker bus and weighed 10 tons. And now we do most of what they can do in three kilograms.

or 10 kilograms or 100 kilograms, but a lot less. Wow. And that has led, as I said, roughly to a thousand-fold increase in performance per unit kilogram, which is the dominant cost because of launch in space. So you could say performance per dollar has changed about a thousand X for satellites over the last same quarter.

So actually, I think that's the dominant change in the last 10, 20 years. Now, everyone's very excited about the rockets. And I like rockets too. I'm a space geek. So I love them. But actually, that's missed the bigger trend, which is the rockets have made things cheaper. But the satellites have actually totally transformed a new set of opportunities. Starlink is one of them in comms. Planet is another with Earth observation. The upshot is more data.

That all brings me to the revolution that hasn't quite happened yet, but is just hitting us. It's called AI. Because AI depends on three things. It's compute, it's algorithms, and it's data. Increasingly, the thing that's holding back the development of AI is the data sets. It's novel and important data sets that can solve real world problems. They can't make synthetic data if you want to help disaster response, or if you want to help security, or if you want to help agriculture, you need real data.

And where do you get that data? You can't train those models without the real data. So our data set and space as a broader community is producing data sets that are very, very relevant to the AI. And vice versa, the AI is very relevant to space because we've produced gobs of data and a lot of people can't get value out of that.

Even the NGA, the biggest consumer of satellite data in the world today is the NGA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. It's an intelligence agency that people have heard less about, but they have thousands of people looking at images.

But that's because they were used to dealing with thousands of images per day. And they would look at them individually, one per person or a few per day per person. I've never even heard of the NGA. Okay. It's like the NSA for satellite data. So the NGA was dealing with thousands of images a day with thousands of analysts. Or maybe it's 10,000, but it's of order thousands. Suddenly, Planet comes along and we're producing alone 4 million images per day. So 1,000 times roughly. Wow.

Maybe it's 100, maybe it's 1,000, but several extra zeros compared with what they were used to. My point was that AI is needed for the space community because now we've broken that system of analytics by human eye. It's got to be via AI systems. Which leads to a really interesting question because I was looking at your financials because you guys are publicly traded.

And I think last year you guys brought in $220 million, which was, you know, a lot more than zero, which is where you started. And it's going up by like 20% a year, but like the share price has been kind of hammered and it doesn't feel like Wall Street is convinced that this is like a business that they love. But how important is AI to like you guys actually...

jumping up in terms of a business, in terms of the money you bring in and actually the value you extract from this, like these oceans of data you're creating. Firstly, the market is going to do what the market is going to do. We are very proud of building up the business that we are building. I think the market hasn't fully understood Planet. They think of us as a space company when we're a data company and platform company. That's a misunderstanding. But we have to prove this out. We

AI is super relevant as an accelerant to that. You mentioned we're growing around 20% over a few years.

That's not where we should be. We should be going much, much faster. But I think we are accelerating our growth. We actually just said on our earnings call last week that we already have visibility to double revenue growth rates by 2026 over 2025. We're building that up to where it should be. And I think the investors will get that as the numbers become clear and get the planet is in this phase.

fantastic position of being able to solve real world problems around the world, massive market opportunity, we estimate 100 billion, and super relevant for AI.

I think that in this world today, you've got to be relevant to AI and you've got to be relevant to the present state of the world, like in geopolitics and in sustainability. And planet is relevant to both. In the past, you and I have spoken about space more broadly and this idea of colonizing the moon or creating a human base on there.

Obviously, this is not Planet's business model, but as somebody who knows intimately the challenges and potential of space, where do you think we are along that? I mean, we just had something, was it the Firefly? Yes. Lander on the moon? Yep. I don't know how big a deal that is. I don't know how we, quote unquote, Joe Public, Joe Bloggs, should be thinking about what is happening in space and this idea of whether...

having a human base on the moon is a real thing? I certainly think it's a real possibility. I think that...

humanity could do it in very short order if we decided that's a priority i think it's very exciting what's happening recently with private lunar missions i think that's going to be an exciting phase i don't think there's a big business opportunity there and that's you know a different matter but i i do think that it's something worthwhile but i don't think it's our first priority

I think our first priority has got to be to this planet. When you look out in the universe, you realize it's mostly dead rocks and gas and haven't yet found any other life anywhere else. And it's either rare or we're the only ones either way.

It is definitely worth taking care of. And right now we're not doing a very good job of that. Jeff Bezos was on stage recently at that New York Times thing in New York. And he said that the one big mistake capitalism has made is that we've screwed up nature. I don't know exactly how he said it, but it's something to that effect. Like we haven't valued nature and therefore we've whittled it away. And that is a cosmic tragedy.

And here at Planet, we are providing the corpus of data that can help us more smartly manage the Earth so that we can take care of human needs, food and air and all the things we need.

and not kill all of biodiversity and this beautiful and cosmically significant life place. So the more, as a space geek, the more I look out, the more I go, wait, we need to help us take care of this planet. So can I ask, as a space person, besides Elon Musk's fever dream of making us multi-planetary, is there a reason why...

When we think about, oh, okay, well, we've got to have an intergalactic backup plan if Earth fails. Why we've decided on Mars when, as you say, the moon is a lot closer and a lot easier. No, I just think it's a strategic mistake.

Just that. Plain and simple. I think people have got wrapped up in sci-fi. And I actually think the moon is almost as adequate as a backup if that's your motivation. Mars doesn't add that much more. And yet it's 100 times more. I think to do a self-sustainable satellite on the moon only costs a couple of billion dollars and takes less than 10 years. Mars is a couple of hundred billion dollars and it's going to take many decades, many, many, many decades.

Tony, I don't want to be rude. That whole last section of the interview sounded like a conversation that the drunk people of London might be having in the pubs tomorrow. No way. The moon or Mars? Wait a minute. Oh, no, no. It's definitely the moon. I mean, what on Mars is it?

conversations you have i know well because especially around elon musk he's like he's like this i mean still for a lot of people he is this mythical figure in tech because he's done a lot of amazing things and everybody's like yeah yeah we're gonna colonize mars that's a really good idea and he wants to do it in the next two decades yeah and you're kind of like why

The moon is right there. Well, I mean, let's not get into the moon versus Mars. Exactly. Yeah, the threshold question of whether we should do any of it at all. I was looking at the SpaceX website and there are compelling arguments for it. So it's the closest, it's our closest habitable neighbor. Decent sunlight, a little cold, but we can warm it up. Yeah.

And it's got a good day length, 24 hours, 37 minutes. Nice. Good 38% of the force of gravity of Earth. Day length. That's

I didn't even think about that. You'd be able to lift heavy things and bound around, says SpaceX. Cool. So again, this is like fever. So wait, wait. Are you saying I could be like a superhero if I lived on Mars? Yeah. You could totally jump up and down and float, but like not so much that you'd float away. How much could I bench press on Mars? Well, I don't know, but it takes six months to get there.

There's some problems. There's some holes. Planet, I think, is just a super interesting company because, again, going from zero to bringing in $220 million and being used by all the government agencies and hedge funds and everything else, I think it's just a fascinating business. And then when you step back and look at what's happening in space, as we've kind of talked about before, if you go back 20 years, there was like 1,000 satellites circling the Earth. Now there's like 12,000.

Because like SpaceX is launching like every couple days, every two to four days, putting more stuff up. And then this week we just had Amazon launch their first part of their constellation for high speed internet as well, Project Kuiper.

The projections are that by 2030, there could be 60,000 satellites circling the Earth. Wow. Doing all kinds of stuff. It was interesting to hear him talk about it as a business because it's the sort of company that you would expect that sort of work to be done by governments, wouldn't you? And when he talked about it, was it the National Geographic? Yeah.

NGA. That was it. Yeah. You can see how governments would be monitoring the earth, but it is an interesting concept that obviously you can use that for commercial purposes too. Yeah. And they've just totally, space has almost been entirely outsourced to private companies now. But yeah, so that's, that's space. Should we come back down to earth? Let's come back down to earth. Hmm.

Yeah, so back down on Earth, we're talking about Elon Musk. He's stepping back from Doge, he said this week, the Department of Government Efficiency. He's still going to be doing a day or two a week, he told the Tesla investors. But it just feels like a good time to reflect on what he's achieved, Danny.

I mean, so he says he saved about $10 billion a week since he started. But the original target was to cut $2 trillion from the budget overall. And that came down to a trillion. And I don't think it's actually quite hit that number yet. No, missing some zeros. And a lot of the alleged savings aren't really proven out or they're hard to verify.

So there's a real big question of like mad 100 days of Musk on stage with a chainsaw saying we're rooting out inefficiency, waste, fraud and abuse, all of that stuff. He famously closed a few departments entirely, fired a bunch of people. But when you're talking about

The federal government, which is more than six, spends more than six trillion dollars a year. It's unclear like whether what he has done is move the needle. Getting rid of any waste or fraud. Great. But given the what it has done for his companies in terms of like brand just being completely tarnished, his dive headlong into politics has been terrible for years.

And if you look at the Tesla numbers earlier this month, sales were down 20% in the quarter. Profits were down 70%. I kind of did a deep dive last week and he sounded like almost like a philosopher on this call with Wall Street analysts. He's like, cast your eyes toward the bright, shining citadel on a hill. That's where we're headed. So.

So he's just got to keep everybody laser focused on that vision and sort of forgetting about the numbers as they stand today, which, as you said, were pretty bleak. Exactly. And he's like, he's a total showman, right? He was like, I'm stepping back from Doge. This is my vision. And the shares went up like 7%. Now, I remember exactly the same thing around Twitter.

Really interesting. They just hate these kind of random diversions that he does and can't quite understand what value it's adding to the business. And we should have mentioned as well, one of the reasons Tesla's results were so bad was because of the tariffs and what's going on with global uncertainty. And they said that in a statement, you know, rapidly evolving trade policy adversely impacts the global supply chain and cost structure of Tesla.

Indeed.

And he said, basically, I want to reassure people in Europe that Microsoft is not going to get involved in some kind of war where we cut off tech supplies or affect, you know, like your use of our software because of because of what happens with the US government, which is a really interesting intervention. And Brad Smith in particular, to your point, he is kind of this diplomat. He is the kind of the chief diplomat of Microsoft. Yeah.

Because he's an executive, but he's really, like I said, I feel it seems almost like he's the chief diplomat. Exactly. Absolutely. Microsoft is like a country with the power of financial firepower of a country. And they've announced billions of dollars of investment into data center infrastructure here. Yeah, he's the lead in that. It's actually, you may remember why everyone paid so much attention when he went on Radio 4's Today program during the, when Microsoft was trying to buy Activision.

the British competition authority said you can't. And he went on the most high profile BBC news program to say Britain is shut for business. And it was a real two fingers up at the government at the time. It's like, you know, if you, if you don't let us make this acquisition, we don't want to be here. Europe's more friendly. Yeah. Well, he can just, I don't know. He just moved to Mars, you know, like I don't think there's a CMA on Mars yet. Yeah.

They should add that to the SpaceX website. List of reasons to move to Mars. Yeah, no competition authority. I'll bring that up in the pub when I'm doing my Mars v Moon. This is actually, can you do this between now and the next pod? Like next time you're amongst friends, be like, guys, guys, very important. Mars or the Moon? Discuss. I will. I'll see if I can make it happen too.

Although I'm going camping this weekend with my eight-year-old, but actually it might be a better conversation. You know, Mars versus the moon. How long can you string that on for? Cool. Well, thanks for that. That was really fun. It's all happening out here. I just find, you know, and you make fun of me for my robot obsession, but I think space is also super interesting. Because the last thing I'll say about space...

Just in defense of my interest is there's 2 billion people who don't have internet access. And if you can basically just build this infrastructure in the sky rather than like digging up thousands of miles of land and through Africa or the Sahara or whatever, and just all of a sudden everybody can be, you know, those 2 billion people or whatever can be connected, that would be a very big change for the world. Yeah.

And there's going to be good and bad in that. But I just think it's, that's kind of what is happening. That's what this race between Amazon and Starlink is all about. And kind of why rockets are going up every other day. It's happening in real time. It's really interesting. So yeah, I like space. No big deal, okay? This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.

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