In the next decade, we'll see three really major things with incredible significance for humanity.
In the next decade, one is AGI. That's, and then second is finding life off Earth. Not necessarily intelligent life, but life off Earth. We will discover it. And the third is decoding animal communications. So between chimps, between dolphins, between different animals. And I think all three are incredible events and the fact that they may all happen in one decade is, and I call them Copernican events because they're nudging us out from being the center of the universe on everything. So obviously AGI is inventing another intelligence alongside us. Finding life off Earth, even if it's not intelligent, will give us a bigger probability that there's life everywhere and it will have got to intelligent stages.
And why do you think we find?
Oh, because telescopes have now got to the stage on the Earth-bound telescopes as well as the JWST are big enough to do atmospheric spectra on planets. So we have, we've discovered thousands of planets mainly by the wobbles of the stars. We look at the wobbles of the stars and go, oh, there must be a planet orbiting around that's tugging on it. Sometimes from them going in front of the star and it dipping the light a tiny bit. But we don't know much about those planets. We know the basic size and orbit, but we don't know what their composition is. Now, we have telescopes that are just big enough to look at the composition of these. And what we'll see if you looked at the Earth from the other side of the galaxy with one of these telescopes or at least like the one, most of these planets are, these star systems that we've detected planets within thousands of light years, so the nearby region of our galaxy, you would quickly see that there's about 20% oxygen in our atmosphere. Now that is highly unusual because oxygen binds with almost anything. That's why we, you know, we get rust and all the rest of it. The only thing that's keeping up that oxygen here on the Earth is all the life, all the plants. And so we could look for that signature or other similar signatures where the best explanation we would have is life is producing it, or more rigorously if we can eliminate that there's other chemical or geological ways, non-life ways of producing those things. So,
So you think we've just had enough advances with the size of the telescopes to be able to block out the sun and just focus on the planet and resolve that and do spectra on it?
We've just got telescopes that are big enough to take spectra of nearby planets. We've got all the targets lined up. We've got thousands of planets. We know where they are. We now need to look at them with these new next-generation of telescopes. And I think we'll get to the point of having a signature that we say the best explanation by far is life within the next 10 years. It might won't be certain. We won't have visited it. We wouldn't have had a little green man wave in the telescope.
If we can talk to animals, I feel like it's going to go really bad for us. I mean fascinating of course and I would 100% want, but I, those first discussions, I don't think humans fare very well in what the animals have to say back.
They might be pretty pissed off, yeah, since we've just wiped out most of them. But I think it would be fascinating, right? Like what are they really talking about, what are they, and there's incredible, I mean whales have been talking, if they've been talking, they've been talking for 70 million years.
They know stuff. Like, can you tell us anything about that? Just imagine the culture that we could learn about.
You think we're going to know what they say to each other?
Well, no. Then we can talk to them for sure. I mean, like, it's an amazing precipice that we could, and then of course, I hope that it will expand our empathy circles to include them in the things we value. Right now we don't really value life.
It's going to be a lot harder to eat them one day.
I hope so. I really hope that's one of the consequences. Yeah.
So, and you think that happens because AI helps like pattern match everything that's going on.
Yeah, exactly. You're going to feed it all of this acoustic data and maybe even body language data or what have you for chimps, and it will start deciphering it. And it may not be that sophisticated. Maybe the dog just says, 'Hey, I'm hungry.' Or, 'I'm pleased to see you again.' You know, but I think we will discover some subtleties about their social behavior, and we'll certainly empathize more with their plight, even if it's very simple. It might be like listening to toddlers that just start understanding language, right? So it's very simple but it's interesting to understand their worldviews and what they see as interesting, what they question. And yeah, I think those three moments of all decentering humans from the middle, just like Copernicus decentered Earth.
But if we saw life that far away, it's not like we would be able to, like it would be amazing to know but we're not getting there anytime soon to have.
Going from one to more than one life, genesis of life in the universe will mean we would know a lot more about the statistical probability of life and how much it's arisen, right? And we've got thousands of planets. If you know a handful of them have life, we would then know that the universe is teeming with life. On the other hand, if we don't find any or none with even strong suspects, because it will never be black and white. It will be an evolution. As I said, that we'll probably find out this planet has got this chemical signature and the best thing we can't think of a volcanic reason that we would have that, the only obvious answer is some sort of life. We don't know for sure, but that's the best explanation we have. We'll get to that point in this decade. And knowing that is cosmologically significant because again we've only had one example so far and if we discovered it on Mars or nearby planets then there's still the question of whether it was panspermia, whether that is, there was one genesis of life and it spawned onto the other one because there's a lot of material moving between our planets in the solar system. But if we discovered it on another solar system the chances of that are really diminished. So it's almost certainly an independent genesis of life which will again mean probably since we've only sampled a tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction, I can't remember exact numbers but roughly I remember thinking there's about a million million million or 10,000 million million million Earth-like planets if you just rounded it down to things that are about the size of the Earth with the chemical composition of the Earth in the universe. So we've got, it's just God knows how many planets of all different shapes and sizes, but we just don't know the fraction of them that have life. We know there's gazillions that have the potential to host life if life got there, but we don't know how many of which life independently arose and we don't know that probability. This main missing question in the Drake equation of how much life is in the universe is the zero to one bit on, if the conditions are right. So we know there's lots of places where the condition is right, but we don't know how often it's arisen.
I mean, if all three of those things happen in a decade, I don't even know what to begin to tell my children to think about, to study, to navigate. You know, I just feel like we're heading to such an upside down, fast-moving.
Yeah. I mean my gran said it was amazing because she saw from horse cart to man on the moon. But this is much more dramatic a change in terms of the intelligence explosion and uncovering and in terms of our position and place in the cosmos, more profound than any of those things.
Got it. Well, given the breadth of things I cover, there's a nonzero chance I could break at least one of those stories, I think.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, try it. Go for it. Yeah. I think it's just that is tantalizing to me what's happening in the next 10 years in those.
Like that excites you. It doesn't scare the living out of you.
I think it's both. But mainly it's excitement especially on the aliens. I mean I can't wait to meet the aliens. No, but I mean as I said it's most likely non-intelligent but still knowing that there's life off Earth will be such a huge thing about life being teeming in the universe.
Will Marshall, what a treat.
Unlike most of my guests, I have written a book about you or made a movie about you.
Yeah. What else do you need to know? I don't know why I'm here.
Well, this is so other people can get to know you. I usually am plugging someone else's book, but I get the rare treat to plug my own. There we go. Went on sale.
Yeah, you do. I'm just kidding. Of course. Do you have one? I should make that happen. Okay, so, trying to embarrass you.
To give people who might not have read When the Heavens Went on Sale or seen Wild Wild Space, shame on them, on HBO. I'll give some context. Will Marshall, a man who's hard to describe in some ways, a physicist, a quite accomplished physicist. Obviously the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. For people who do not know what that company does, they really pioneered a new way to image the Earth from space using hundreds of satellites that take photos of every spot on the Earth's land mass many times a day. It's been a revolutionary technology, not just in terms of getting new imagery about Earth, but also in how satellites were manufactured, turning that into a mass production feat, which now we see SpaceX, other companies doing all over the place. And so, and worked at NASA, did a bunch of cool missions. One of which not only helped confirm that we had water at the poles of the moon, but found more water.
Lots of water. Yeah. Five or six percent by mass water on the south pole of the moon. Yeah. But also like hydrocarbons. So there was methane detected, CO2, some nitrates, some really interesting stuff in volatile form that could be useful for a base there one day.
Was really cool mission. You were part of, which I document in the book and the movie, this revolutionary group of youngsters at NASA that turned NASA into quite an exciting place.
Under the stewardship of Pete Worden, who deserves all the credit that you give him in that book.
Is a great, great man. And then also one last bit and then I'll shut up. A thing that I've been interested in for a long time. Lived in communal houses, kind of a communal house pioneer in Silicon Valley, which we will get into. So, yeah, those were the big bits. Are you offended if I left anything out?
There's tons of directions I want to go. First off, just as far as the book and the movie go, I always try to give people a chance to settle, you know, since I get the pen and I get to make the movie. Anything you would like to publicly, you know, flog me about?
No, not at all. Firstly, I thought it was an incredibly, it was delightful that you chose this topic to dive in a little bit more. A lot of people don't know about this revolution that's happening in space. I thought the way you did it was a relatively good character portrayal of all the crazy kids there, you know, like Chris Kemp. It's not necessarily an exaggeration what you say. And Peter Beck. I think you get the, you know, I've challenged you before on the title, which I thought didn't really, and your editors pushed you on that. But it's not about the commercialization. That's not the focus. The focus is so much more deeply missionary. And it really is about how do we help life on Earth? How do we explore the stars? It's so much bigger to put it down into monetary terms is to belittle the ambition in a way of the crew and the cast of characters. I know you had editor pressure but I want to tell you one fun anecdote that after Wild Wild Space I was at a very high-level conference, the Munich Security Conference, a lot of heads of state and generals and the big security forum of the year, and a general literally chased me down because he recognized me as I passed him by in the corridor and it was basically the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and he had seen the Wild Wild Space documentary, got so excited that he wanted to have a meeting and talk about how our data could be very helpful to monitor Russia and other things that he was trying to do and to demonstrate how NATO could move faster on new tech. And so we ended up forging a partnership that actually got announced earlier this summer. It was a great partnership that we're still in the early phases of, but of monitoring large areas with AI and our data set, but it came directly, I cannot explain any other thing that instigated that partnership.
I'm sure he would have found you anyway. All right. What do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies. 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations rely on Brex for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses. And Brex's AI software runs right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money and take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. Core Memory and the book, it seems to have found an audience among the military. The Space Force made it like book of the year or something. They wanted me to come speak in Colorado and.
Um, I mean I guess it makes sense in some ways but yeah, it's always funny to see where these things end up.
Have you had other people recognize you on like a United flight or anything like that?
So many people started saying I saw the film because United put it on their thing. So lots of people and yes occasionally I've had a few, luckily it's not too much. But like a few times I've been hiking out and somebody's like, 'Are you that guy from that space documentary?' I'm like, yep, guilty as charged.
I know you're upset about the 'Crash Capitalism' of the title of the book, but, and we will get into that, I think, with some other questions, but you were a somewhat reluctant participant in the documentary. It took a while to warm you up. I think my sense was always you were a bit unsure of the outcome on that. Do you think that's fair?
I think it's fair. I think that my logical brain is always, must do the most important things to get our mission accomplished and I didn't put media plans as center to that. So that's one aspect of it. Secondly, I'm like I don't want people prying into my personal life so much. It's just, I'm not trying to, you know, get attention like that. But I thought you guys did an amazing job in the documentary of portraying what was going on and I was so pleased and proud of the way which it showed how these entrepreneurs are doing amazing things. I thought, so I think you did a great job.
All right. You're being nicer to me than I'd expected. Okay, you have to tell me if this one story is true or not for you. True or false? You do live and have lived in a communal house for many, many years. We asked many times to film at the communal house. You told me, I think at one point that the house had voted no. They didn't want the camera then. However, I was at a party with somebody who lives in your house and they said, 'Yeah, it's too bad you guys didn't film.' Really? I said, 'Wasn't it universal?' Well, they said, 'Will didn't want that?' Then they said, 'Well, Will asked us to have a vote one night and we all voted yes to film.' And now I need to know if that is true.
Honestly, I can't remember doing any such a vote. But definitely there were varied opinions. But no, it was more personal decision for me. Let me just own it. Like it's more a personal decision for me.
I want to start with the communal house bit just for a second, which is maybe not the most natural place to start, but I think it's interesting. So you guys, I think it is okay to say they used to live in the Rainbow Mansion, which was this large mansion in Cupertino. Still exists today. There's still people living there. I think this is, these kinds of houses I guess go back decades in some ways, especially in the Northern California spirit. But I always felt like you guys put a modern twist and flavor. A lot of it had grown up out of the counterculture movement and I don't know, some culty kind of things and stuff like that. But in this period when you were working at NASA and were with a bunch of these smart, energetic 20-year-olds off doing interesting things, you had a group living in this. I always felt like you took this to the, and anyone who knows me knows I'm not saying this in a derogatory way, like the nerd version of this house. You know what I mean? And shifted a little bit and then in the subsequent years these communal houses of tech people are all over Silicon Valley. I find a lot of times they're almost themed. It's like this is the effective altruism house. This house is doing hardware. Whatever. And so for people who have never lived in a communal house, who have no idea what this culture is like, you've done this now for what, like 25 years or so?
Yeah. I mean, what is it like? Why do you do it? It's an important part of your life. I mean, you guys believe in this.
So I like to spin the question around of why wouldn't you? So it goes a bit further back than the '60s hippies counterculture, of course it's how humans have lived for all of our evolution and the more obvious question to me is why wouldn't you live in a community? And in this case, so I can give you a practical answer which is, you know, we feed on ideas off each other. You learn what's the latest stuff in AI and robotics or nanotechnology or what have you by having a community of people that are, and then you see intersections and then you spur each other on and you support each other in doing those great projects trying to help the world. We did, I think the technology is one thematic focus and another thematic focus for our community houses has been technology and society and the intersection of those things and how do we bring about technology into society in a way that maximizes the benefits, minimizes the harms. And we thought a lot about those questions. And I would say, so I don't know how much our community houses have directly led to other community houses in the Bay Area. There certainly feels like there's a big resurgence of them. I'm not sure if that's because of us, you know, I can't attribute that, but what I could say is that the ideas that have come out of these houses have been absolutely widely shared. I mean I always think that we are talking about the things that start to become popular to talk about, about some of the challenges of technology for example, we're talking about them five years earlier, several years earlier.
Because you have these communal dinners, you have these salons.
Philosophy salons where we talk about, okay, what's going to be the application of this cryptocurrency when combined with this humanitarian situation over there combined with it, and we talk about those, we scenario that. And we have interesting thought leaders come through and they know when they come to the Bay Area to stay at our place because they've stayed there before and they know that that's where they'll get the latest touch on what's going on in Silicon Valley. And that community has led to ideas that have, you know, numerous TED talks on numerous topics have happened a few years later on that topic after we've baked it a little bit if you like. So really, I think, so yeah, but that more philosophical question is like, why would you not live in a community? I think the recent and local phenomenon of living not in a community is a peculiarity that will get reversed when people realize it's very natural to live with other people and especially a chosen family. We call it a chosen family because these are people effectively your brothers and sisters because you live with them for years and do cool stuff together with them. And to do that, it's so much more fulfilling than living on your own if you can get basic things right. And people immediately think, oh, it must be a mess like student dorms. It doesn't have to be a mess.
It seems like you would be at odds with someone and it would be very awkward to get them out of the house and I know you have a selection of people.
Yeah, but it still feels like that could go wrong often.
We've had more than a hundred in our community house and once or twice we've had issues where we really actually had to ask somebody to leave.
Yeah. And you even as you've gotten older, you've look, not to be crass again, but you've made quite a bit of money I assume from Planet. Your tastes, your desires, they haven't changed over the course of these 20 plus years.
No, I don't really care about it like that. And ironically once I realized I was, because I don't look at my detailed finances all the time, and suddenly I realized that somehow I was in the smallest room in the house paying the most, because we had set up this egalitarian system of paying which was dependent on your salary, not your ability to contribute. But I liked having more people so I had chosen this really small room that no one else.
Are you still in that room?
No. No. Things moved on. So.
What is your, does your room look like a luxurious bedroom or is it closer to a dorm or something like that?
Well, I've had various rooms over the years. But yeah, I don't know. There's not much to say about that.
I mean, you at one time, didn't you sleep on a bit of plywood over a bathtub?
How long did you do that? Like a year or something. I don't know. It wasn't that long. I was thinking of making a contraption to let me fall into the bath in the morning. It was an automatic alarm clock.
Did you have to take the plywood off so people could use every day so people.
No, no, no. It wasn't an active bathroom. I converted the bathroom into.
Okay. I mean, I think you do have a point which is it's bizarre to me in our neighborhood. Like I know almost, I know one neighbor but I don't know anywhere near all our people. People just don't talk to each other.
We have lost community. When we threw out churches, which you know I have some sympathy for in certain senses, the fundamental dogmatic belief systems and so on, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. The baby being the community sense and the time together to think together and someone giving a sermon about what's right and wrong and turning the other cheek and all this basic stuff. And we don't do that anymore. We don't have a community. We don't rely on each other and I think that's part of the challenge we face in our society. We've got a lot of divisive politics and other things because people can't talk to each other.
But you trace this back to religion being less of a.
Well, certainly in Europe, which is where I'm from, average attendance in churches just plummeted in the last sort of century. I don't know exact numbers, but the vast majority of people don't go to church because they're not religious. They didn't subscribe to any particular religion, but as a consequence lost the community.
Okay. And why do you think, I know you guys have, you've even started some communal houses in other parts of the world, but why is this primarily a Bay Area phenomenon and if so why?
Well again I'd like to turn the question on its head. I think it's a fairly western and local in time phenomenon that people don't live in community, because in much of the world often grandkids and uncles and aunts and cousins are all mixed together in much bigger family units, more like we have throughout history. And it's only really in the west in the last 100-200 years that we have separated out to this nuclear family unit concept and tried to live on our own, which made it much harder to raise kids because it takes a village, and all these other challenges that I think that stresses on society.
Okay. And in the context of Planet Labs, I mean the Rainbow Mansion played a key role, right? Some of these discussions that you're talking about took place. This idea of, you've always been an environmentalist, I think it's fair to say. And this idea that one of the original ideas was, okay, we're going to photograph the Earth in ways that haven't been done before to show people, to keep track of what is happening to the planet, to see when things are being deforested, to see how rivers change, to monitor. And that did feel like a direct result of the conversations you guys were having.
For sure. And many other startups came out of these community houses as well. But yeah, for sure. I can also trace some of our Luna mission that you mentioned earlier to some of the conversations that we had in Rainbow Mansion. But yeah, my personal motivation is strongly related to how we can help track all of nature to help us take care of it. If you think cosmically, if you think with the big picture, life is either extraordinarily rare or singular. I think it's much more likely the former than the latter but we only know of one location for life.
And I did a quick calculation the other day just to give you a sense, life matter in our galaxy. We think of gold as pretty rare on the earth, and it's about one in a few billion atoms per, a billionth of the mass of the earth. Life in our galaxy, if it is on one in 10 star systems, is a billion times rarer than gold is on earth. Life is just, even if it's at the sort of maximal end of how much life there could be in the universe based on our current observations, or at least in our galaxy, if there's not some crazy hidden structures of massive amounts of life in our galaxy, it doesn't seem like there is, it's a billion times rarer than gold on the earth. The vast majority of mass of the universe is gas and dust and rocks and things that are not alive. The preciousness of this just from a diversity standpoint is obscene. Right?
So we have this incredible diversity of life and it's almost our cosmic duty to take care of it. It is cosmologically significant. It's not just locally significant. It's cosmologically significant because it's either so rare that it's just extraordinarily rare stuff in the universe or it's the only one. Either way, the duty of humans is above anything else to help take care of life on the earth. The incredible complexity, the ecologies that we find are so beautiful. We are so lucky. And yeah, so it's also a cosmic tragedy, and this is uncomfortable to talk about because people don't like talking about non-fun stuff, but we have wiped out 70% of life by numbers, by population decline. It's 80% for wild mammals. So there's 80% less deer and moose, and there's 70% less fish in freshwater rivers and lakes. There's 75% less insects than there were 40 years ago. Half the corals have gone, half the forests have gone. We're doing what on this most unique and rare thing. Imagine taking your one piece of jewelry and smashing it with a hammer and throwing away half of it. I mean, come on. So yeah, I think it's our most important priority and we're not doing a very good job right now. So yeah, part of the point of Planet is to give ourselves the tools to help us take care of that.
Okay. Since day one, the Core Memory podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. And in that context, I run the risk of sending this podcast off in a drastically tangential direction. But a lot of these issues that you've brought up, you and I have talked about many times. I haven't really caught up with you since the whole AI boom. This part of the AI boom took off when you and I feel like sometimes this question is so, can lead to everybody has their doom and gloom and all this, but I haven't talked to you since all this stuff happened. I mean, you were already concerned about where the planet and humanity was going. Has AI made you feel better or worse over the last like two or three years?
Well, it's a complicated question, but AI I'm very excited about and I want to get into some of the things we're doing with that. Just as a person I mean it's incredible what is now possible, right? Almost everything we say oh only humans can do this, we can now do it with AI. I mean amazing. But just in terms of its interface with climate and the environment, there's this thing called the Jevons paradox, which you know basically, everyone knows that AI is eating lots of energy directly, right? It's driving lots of energy consumption. And that's going to massively increase. But I think the bigger impact for the planet is its indirect implications that it's making everything more efficient. Whether that's agriculture, oil and gas, mining, all these big industries, what is making those industries more efficient? Well, that mining operation that wasn't going to be possible before, that oil and gas exploration that wasn't going to be possible before, because it was just slightly too expensive, now is just slightly possible to do.
So in general with the Jevons paradox, or sort of version of elasticity of demand, humans when they invent new technology, things become more efficient. You could in principle use that efficiency to do the same thing with less. I can make this can with slightly less aluminum. So I will use the same number of cans but with less material. Great. Except in practice what humans do is then go and use that efficiency to do even more. So then we end up extracting even more aluminum than before because we just have twice as many cans. So AI is that on steroids, right? It's making all sectors of the world more efficient and that means we're going to speed up the blowing up of the planetary boundaries. The wasting away of biodiversity is being driven by material consumption, agriculture and these things. So by making them more efficient we're going to drive that in faster. So whilst AI can help us in key ways, climate modeling, helping us solve fusion, helping us make more efficient use of data centers, grids, the more impactful unfortunately I think the default way in which AI is going to have an impact in our capitalist-driven society is definitely going to be accelerating the exploitation of the planet, unless the AI leaders themselves decide or we as a society decide to deploy it preferentially on that climate modeling and fusion and less preferentially on resource extraction industries. But I don't see any signs of that right now unfortunately. So meaning, unless it's like one of those technologies, oh technology is how you use it man, but by default it will accelerate us blowing up the planet. That is pretty clear to me. So obviously we're trying to help the reverse by merging AI and our data sets to help us take care of the planet. But if I zoom out and think about the macro, how's AI going to play with our entire economy? I think that's the way it's going to play out.
